Equation 1 · Part 2 · What Alignment Actually Costs

Symbol C_human

C_{\mathrm{align}} \approx C_{\mathrm{human}} + C_{\mathrm{RL}} + C_{\mathrm{redteam}}

C_{\mathrm{human}}

What this part means

the cost of collecting human feedback — demonstrations and preference comparisons, priced per label and bounded by how many people can be recruited and trained.

Its job in the formula

$C_h$ uman is a part of this expression. Its role is fixed by the surrounding article and by the operations shown in the formula.

Full expressionSymbol C_humanArticle meaning

Where the article explains it

$C_{\mathrm{human}}$ is the cost of collecting human feedback — demonstrations and preference comparisons, priced per label and bounded by how many people can be recruited and trained.

The passage around this formula

…piece assembles the documented cost structure of alignment and safety work at the scale frontier labs now operate, decomposed into three cost centres that map onto three distinct kinds of scarcity: $C_{\mathrm{align}} \approx C_{\mathrm{human}} + C_{\mathrm{RL}} + C_{\mathrm{redteam}}$ . $C_{\mathrm{human}}$ is the cost of collecting human feedback — demonstrations and preference comparisons, priced per label and bounded by how many people can be recruited and trained. $C_{\mathrm{RL}}$ is the compute spent training a policy against a reward model or a verifier, priced in GPU-hours and…

Read this part in the article →

Learn the underlying idea

A subscript is a label attached below a symbol. It often selects a time step, component, category, or member of a sequence.

Open the illustrated subscripts: which member of a family? guide →

See this notation across published equations →

The article lists its research sources here.