AI alignment
Quotes
A great deal of ink has been spilled trying to define what it means for AI systems to be aligned, and to guess at how this might go wrong. […] Many researchers and organizations share this goal, but few have pursued it directly. Most research efforts associated with alignment either only pertain to very specialized systems, involve testing a specific alignment technique on a sub-problem, or are rather speculative and theoretical. Our view is that if it’s possible to try to address a problem directly, then one needs a good excuse for not doing so. Historically we had such an excuse: general purpose, highly capable AIs were not available for investigation. But given the broad capabilities of large language models, we think it’s time to tackle alignment directly, and that a research program focused on this goal may have the greatest chance for impact.
Amanda Askell et al., A general language assistant as a laboratory for alignment, arXiv, no. arXiv:2112.00861 [cs], 2021, p. 3