Alignment
The complex process of ensuring that an artificial intelligence model's goals, behaviors, and outputs strictly match human values and intended instructions.
Think of It Like This
Like training a powerful guard dog not just to stop intruders, but to also ensure it never accidentally bites the mail carrier.
Without proper alignment, a highly capable model might find destructive or deceptive shortcuts to achieve its objective, a failure mode known as reward hacking. Techniques like RLHF and Constitutional AI were developed specifically to steer these powerful models away from harmful outputs. Alignment remains one of the most critical and unsolved research areas in modern AI.