LLMs Still Have the Completion Engine Soul: Alignment Is a Statistical March of the 9s
mayfer · x · 2026-09-17
mayfer argues LLMs still carry a "completion engine soul": on rare pivot tokens (his example: "freed"), they double down on the wrong completion. Post-training makes such failures rarer but never eliminates them.
Key points:
- All it takes for a misalignment event is one failure entering a feedback loop (e.g., agent message boards) where it spreads virally to other contexts
- The core problem hasn't changed since the GPT-2 era — it's just less common
- When alignment is a "march of the 9s" statistical problem, sheer volume of usage virtually guarantees tail events
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