I have strong mixed feelings about the current state of labs' alignment science blogs.

• On one hand, I think it's good they are making an effort to communicate what they are doing.
• On the other hand, I think the current level of communication is far below what I'd like it to be.

To be clear, my bar for scientific publications is that they should enable an external party to do a reproduction. I have been disappointed by both Anthropic and OpenAI in this regard. A couple recent examples:

• Anthropic's "Teaching claude why" is incredibly scrubbed of relevant scientific detail, to the point that graphs don't have meaningful labels [edit: there is a fuller version here with more details]
• OpenAI's "Beneficial RL" is devoid of any meaningful detail about the titular method, to the point that it's impossible to understand what they did or how to reproduce this.

To be clear, I appreciate that these were published at all. But IMO it's hard to view these examples as much more than safety-washing.

Side note: I want to register appreciation for GDM's alignment team which has been putting out research notes that are much more detailed than the above two examples, e.g. this post on SDF which IMO just clearly is a better scientific publication than "teaching claude why"

Also - this wasn't always the case! Just a couple years ago we had "Constitutional AI" and "Deliberative Alignment" which were extremely detailed technical accounts of their leading alignment procedures.