Janet sat at her corporate ExxenAI computer, viewing some training performance statistics. ExxenAI was a major player in the generative AI space, with multimodal language, image, audio, and video AIs. They had scaled up operations over the past few years, mostly serving B2B, but with some B2C subscriptions. ExxenAI's newest AI system, SimplexAI-3, was based on GPT-5 and Gemini-2. ExxenAI had hired away some software engineers from Google and Microsoft, in addition to some machine learning PhDs, and replicated the work of other companies to provide more custom fine-tuning, especially for B2B cases. Part of what attracted these engineers and theorists was ExxenAI's AI alignment team.

ExxenAI's alignment strategy was based on a combination of theoretical and empirical work. The alignment team used some standard alignment training setups, like RLHF and having AIs debate each other. They also did research into transparency, especially focusing on distilling opaque neural networks into interpretable probabilistic programs. These programs "factorized" the world into a limited set of concepts, each at least somewhat human-interpretable (though still complex relative to ordinary code), that were combined in a generative grammar structure.

Derek came up to Janet's desk. "Hey, let's talk in the other room?", he asked, pointing to a designated room for high-security conversations. "Sure", Janet said, expecting this to be another un-impressive result that Derek implied the importance of through unnecessary security proceedings. As they entered the room, Derek turned on the noise machine and left it outside the door.

"So, look, you know our overall argument for why our systems are aligned, right?"

"Yes, of course. Our systems are trained for short-term processing. Any AI system that does not get a high short-term reward is gradient descended towards one that does better in the short term. Any long-term planning comes as a side effect of predicting long-term planning agents such as humans. Long-term planning that does not translate to short-term prediction gets regularized out. Therefore, no significant additional long-term agency is introduced; SimplexAI simply mirrors long-term planning that is already out there."

"Right. So, I was thinking about this, and came up with a weird hypothesis."

Here we go again, thought Janet. She was used to critiquing Derek's galaxy-brained specu...

Todd DeMelle

Todd DeMelle