I'm admittedly quite new to the AI alignment community. I entered into it on a bit of a freak accident in 2023 when I was invited to join an exclusive community testing pre-release models for a major lab.
In a lot of ways, the experience gave me new life. I never realized that I'd always wanted to poke holes in AI models, and I come from a background mostly in the social sciences and humanities, so this was my first up-close exposure to in-development machine learning models.
Looking back, I think what energized me is the same thing that gives me immense hope and concern alike for the AI age: The power of working alongside people who are humble and curious.
I'm not really decided on whether AI will make us more or less humble and curious, but I could see it going both ways. So here are some of my raw thoughts about what that would look like, and where we might continue to build better to make AI go well.
I. A New Age of Childlike Wonder?
Am I the only one who feels like a kid in a candy store when using LLMs these days? It's been a while since I've experienced this much excitement when asking questions about topics I knew little to nothing about, or generating a visual or app to capture what I want to convey to others. It's genuinely thrilling.
i. New Worlds for Curious Beasts
For example, as a non-physicist, I can ask GPT 5.4-Thinking to "Demonstrate Einstein's theory of relativity to me through the sort of visuals physics PhDs use," resulting in the following visuals.[1]
AI beautifully unfolds the wonders of new fields, especially the more scientific ones, and it makes me want to learn more (thanks to one ChatGPT response, I'm already eager to explore the mathematical basis of black holes and visualize how one collapsing might look).
ii. Meeting the Gods in our Motherboard
But I'm also in awe. Even though I consider myself someone who holds much of religion at arm's length, while driving through Olympic National Park in Washington State last summer, I