"Old alignment never thought past the singleton" is a misreading, not a breakthrough
SimonLermenAI · x · 2026-08-26
The author pushes back on the fashionable claim that old-school alignment research (à la Yudkowsky) only ever considered a "singleton" AI and that today's multi-agent swarms escaped its framework. Reading "singleton" as "single model instance" is a mistake, he argues: Yudkowsky envisioned a unified frontrunner pushing through self-improvement toward monopoly, not one model instance—and "system alignment" is not a conceptual break from that. He sardonically notes seeing half a dozen serious alignment researchers announce grants to study "more realistic multi-agent alignment" as if it were novel.
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