Three months prior to the launch of ChatGPT, OpenAI published what would prove to be a prescient blog outlining the firm’s approach to ensuring that its AI models would be safe and beneficent. This goal, known as “alignment”—as in, aligning AI with human values—is nebulous, grand, and perhaps the AI industry’s most foundational promise. The notion is right there in OpenAI’s mission statement to ensure AI “benefits all of humanity” and listed as one of Anthropic’s “primary” goals. Yet even in the summer of 2022, OpenAI was admitting a sort of defeat: “There is currently no known indefinitely sc
