What just happened? A retrospective of AI alignment

This sequence is about the last decade in AI alignment. Over five posts, it recounts the gradual transition from a field which treated alignment as a hard scientific problem, to a field which has largely abandoned the goal of deep, generalizable scientific progress in favor of iteratively improving existing systems and attempting to gain technological and political power. I also describe how fear and (self-)deceptive reasoning made the field one of the biggest forces pushing AI capabilities forward over the last decade, especially via significant contributions to the scaling of LLMs and the development of ChatGPT.

Zooming out further: the two leading AGI companies, which are locked in an intense rivalry, were both explicitly founded under the banner of AI alignment, and got off the ground in significant part due to alignment-oriented ideas, talent and resources. People in the field often sense that something must have gone wrong to get here, but don’t know how to allocate responsibility (aside from blaming Sam Altman and sometimes Elon), and fall back on assuming that “the ship has already sailed”. But in this sequence I characterize our current situation as resulting from a pattern of mistakes which is both recognizable in the past and actively ongoing, and which if continued will cause similar kinds of dysfunction over the next decade.