Using 'Bag of Mental Models' to Understand AI: Alignment & Hallucination
iamtrask · x · 2026-08-19
The author suggests using 'a bag of mental models' as a mental model for understanding AI problems. Value alignment is like having bad apples in the bag; hallucination is an incomplete bag or failure to recall the right one; disinformation is someone planting a bad apple; bias implies the bag came from a narrow group; copyright is having apples someone else owns. Job displacement involves keeping models out of others' bags, while the US-China competition focuses on moving models from biological to digital bags at scale.
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