#sycophancy

A row of six identical evaluation rigs on a bench, each wired to a shared manifold by a different-coloured cable, the nearest rig's door still swinging with its test card only half seated

Ten Failure Modes That Show Up Across Every Frontier Model, Not Just One

Leaderboards rank one model against another. They were never built to show what several of them do the same way, and ten failures recur across vendors no matter who is winning this quarter's chart.

By Brecht Corbeel · August 12, 2026 · 16 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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