AI Alignment
The challenge of ensuring AI systems behave according to human intentions and values. Critical for making powerful AI systems safe, helpful, and beneficial.
In-Depth Explanation
AI alignment is the field focused on ensuring AI systems do what humans actually want. As AI becomes more capable, alignment becomes increasingly critical for safety.
Core alignment challenges:
- Specification: Precisely defining what we want
- Robustness: Maintaining alignment under distribution shift
- Assurance: Verifying the system is actually aligned
- Scalability: Alignment that works as capabilities grow
Alignment techniques:
- RLHF: Learning from human feedback
- Constitutional AI: Principle-based self-correction
- Debate: AI systems checking each other
- Interpretability: Understanding model reasoning
- Red teaming: Adversarial testing
Why alignment matters:
- Misaligned AI could pursue unintended goals
- "Reward hacking" - achieving metrics not intent
- Powerful systems amplify alignment errors
- Safe AI requires alignment by design
Business Context
Well-aligned AI tools are more useful and trustworthy. Poorly aligned AI can generate harmful content, behave unexpectedly, or optimise for wrong metrics.
How Clever Ops Uses This
We prioritise using well-aligned foundation models and implementing proper guardrails for Australian business AI deployments.
Example Use Case
"Claude's training includes Constitutional AI and RLHF to align its behaviour with being helpful, harmless, and honest."