Intermediate · Fundamentals

AI Safety & Alignment

Visual diagram · (in preparation) · Math · (in preparation) · Worked example · 3 difficulty levels.

TL;DR. The field ensuring AI systems behave as intended, remain under human control, and avoid unintended harm.

Technical Definition

The field ensuring AI systems behave as intended, remain under human control, and avoid unintended harm.

How it works

Key concerns include specification gaming, deceptive alignment, power-seeking behavior, and loss of oversight. Technical approaches include RLHF, constitutional AI, interpretability research, and red-teaming.

Related Concepts

• Large Language Model (LLM) — A massive neural network trained on vast text corpora to understand and generate human language with remarkable fluency.
• RLHF (Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback) — A technique that aligns LLM outputs with human preferences by training a reward model from human comparisons.
• Explainability (XAI) — Techniques making AI decisions understandable to humans, crucial for trust and regulatory compliance.