#alignment

A comparison console in a bright audit room, a printed objective specification lying open on the left beside a matte-glass screen scrolling a held-out behaviour transcript on the right, with a small discrepancy indicator between them lit only halfway

Outer Alignment, Inner Alignment, and Why the Difference Matters

Aligned is not one property but two — whether the specified objective is right, and whether the trained system actually pursues it. A documented case shows exactly where the two split apart, and why neither one alone is what people mean by safe.

By Brecht Corbeel · August 12, 2026 · 6 min read

A row of rater workstations in a bright annotation lab, the nearest screen showing one prompt above two candidate responses in side-by-side panes with neither of them chosen yet, an annotation guideline binder open on the desk and racks of training nodes standing behind

Alignment & Safety

What RLHF Actually Optimises: Rated Agreeableness, and Where It Parts from Helpfulness

Reinforcement learning from human feedback does not install correctness. It fits a scalar model of what raters approved of and then pushes a policy up that surface — which is a different thing, in identifiable places.

By Brecht Corbeel · August 8, 2026 · 17 min read

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