Current frontier models are overtly egregiously misaligned. But I don’t think this is evidence against the circa-2023 “alignment by default“ hypothesis. If I’m recalling correctly, the hypothesis was smth like “if we do RL where we score highly transcripts which look good to a human and score poorly transcripts which look bad to a human, then the model would be aligned to human values”. I still think this might be true. I don’t find this more unlikely than I did in 2023. Note that current frontier models are obviously not aligned to human values, but they’re being RLed where the highest scoring transcripts look obviously misaligned to a human! No one predicted that would lead to aligned models.