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Comment by lukewarm707 | Hacker News Reader

There is no such thing as 'alignment'. I want the model to be aligned with my intent, which can be whatever I want it to be. Your intent is not a more real or objective intent than mine.

More specifically, alignment is a reference; 'alignment with X'. A reference necessitates a referent.

You can't reify 'alignment', it is not an intrinsic property of a model.

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The point is that we don't know how to ensure they are aligned with anyone: not the company, the user, or the rest of humanity.

If someone claims that a model is 'aligned', it makes sense to insist that they specify with whom it is aligned. If someone claims that 'alignment is far from solved', they're probably pointing out that nobody understands the models well enough to be confident they are robustly aligned with any chosen set of values (including 'do whatever lukewarm707 wants').

There is such thing as alignment, the first 18 years of most people's lives in the modern world are about learning it. If you act too far outside of it we put you in a cage or elect you.

You can refine alignment with a set of stated goals. The harder parts are aligning words with human social behaviors.

There are people who are loud about absolute free speech, who have no clue what that really means, and almost nobody really wants that. For example, because almost nobody wants it to affect them negatively, which it would with real absolute free speech.

So even when people "know", and can say what they "want", they don't really.

Yes, there is an "alignment" in society, but it's a messy, mushy thing, it's not great at all with deterministic machines, even as models are not deterministic in a different sense.

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