This post provides an overview of the sequence and covers background concepts that the later posts build on. If you're already familiar with AI alignment, you can likely skim or skip the foundations section.

0.1 What is this Sequence?

This sequence explains the difficulties of the alignment problem and our current approaches for attacking it. We mainly look at alignment approaches that we could actually implement if we develop AGI within the next 10 years, but most of the discussed problems and approaches are likely still relevant even if we get to AGI through a different ML paradigm.

Towards the end of the sequence, I also touch on how competently AI labs are addressing safety concerns and what political interventions would be useful.

0.1.1 Why am I writing this?

Because in my opinion, no adequate technical introduction exists, and having more people who understand the technical side of the current situation seems useful.

There are other introductions^[1] that often introduce problems and solution approaches, but I don’t think people get the understanding to evaluate whether the solution approaches are adequate for solving the problems. Furthermore, the problems are often presented as disconnected pieces, rather than components of the underlying alignment problem.

Worse, even aside from introductions, there is rarely research that actually looks at how the full problem may be solved, rather than just addressing a subproblem or making progress on a particular approach.^[2]

In this sequence, we are going to take a straight look at the alignment problem and learn about approaches that seem useful for solving it - including with the help from AIs.

0.1.2 What this Sequence isn’t

It’s not an overview of what people in the field believe. We will focus on getting technical understanding, not on learning in more detail what experts believe. I’m taking my understanding and trying to communicate the relevant basics efficiently - not trying to communicate how many experts think about the problem.
It’s not an overview of what people are working on, nor an exhaustive overview of alignment approaches. As we will discuss, I think our current approaches are not likely to scale to aligning fully superhumanly smart AIs. There’s a lot of useful work that’s being done to make our current approaches scale a little further, which may be great for getting AIs that can do other useful work

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Advanced Intro to AI Alignment

Advanced Intro to AI Alignment