this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2026
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Any pause will have to be a global treaty; the unfortunate reality is that we're in an arms race now, and despite Sanders' threats otherwise, I don't think there is going to be much will to pause in the US while China keeps developing.
And to be clear, I think it would be every wise to pause development and, afterwards, keep the pace slow. We know how to make "AI" more capable, but we don't know how to make it stay aligned with human goals. The technology is useful and isn't going anywhere, but that doesn't mean we have to develop it as quickly as possible without regard to the real dangers it brings with it.
Which is why tech CEOs love to promote it. They know it'll never happen.
"Alignment" is almost entirely a myth cooked up by AI companies who want to make their word generators sound scarier than they are. There's no such thing: the next word generator generates next word. It's unpredictable because it's built that way. "Hallucination" and "going rogue", all poor terms and pathetic attempts to fearmonger and humanize, are identical functions to "working" and "aligning".
The "it's just inevitable" cliche rears its ugly head again.
Alignment is a real thing, though it can be a less than apt description. Mostly the goals you write out and the goals you want to happen not being the same thing. You can also have alignment issues where the dataset doesn't match the real data in some way and the classifications break down. (I am not an AI defender I am very anti-AI)
I thought alignment was just preventing the llm from making porn or bomb recipes to avoid legal trouble
No, that would be bad, but not misaligned necessarily. That's a different issue really. Like lets say you use ML to make an AI to play a video game and the goal is always on the right side, but after you're done training, it's on the left now, the AI might have not learned go the goal, but go to the right.