Researcher: alignment's basic problems are known, yet almost nobody works on them directly

jd_pressman · x · 2026-10-16

AI researcher JD Pressman argues that "we actually seem to know what the basic problems are, nobody seems to be trying to directly solve them, and nobody seems to particularly care." He calls for practical interventions against the various forms of Goodhart's law during RL. His interlocutor notes that aside from past emergent misalignment results, few examples come to mind, and that their slim optimism rests on the slow accumulation of small pieces of countervailing evidence.

Related event: Alignment Researcher: Core Problems Known but Almost Nobody Solving Them(3 posts)→

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