Can business incentives drive real progress on hard AI alignment problems?

dhadfieldmenell · x · 2026-08-26

Discusses a critical open question: whether prosaic business incentives for companies to prevent models from disobeying instructions or randomly hacking users will lead to actual progress on hard alignment problems.

The author notes that we are currently failing at simple aspects of alignment before even reaching the "Hard Problems." However, the silver lining is that this creates demand for training algorithms robust to environment/evaluation misspecification, which is essential for solving those hard problems anyway.

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