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Equation 1 · Part 6 · What Alignment Actually Costs

addition

Calign≈Chuman+CRL+CredteamC_{\mathrm{align}} \approx C_{\mathrm{human}} + C_{\mathrm{RL}} + C_{\mathrm{redteam}}
addition

What this part means

Add the term after the plus sign to the term or group before it.

Its job in the formula

Add the term after the plus sign to the term or group before it.

The passage around this formula

This 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: Calign≈Chuman+CRL+CredteamC_{\mathrm{align}} \approx C_{\mathrm{human}} + C_{\mathrm{RL}} + C_{\mathrm{redteam}}. ChumanC_{\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. CRLC_{\mathrm{RL}} is the compute spent training a policy against a reward model or a verifier, priced in GPU-hours and bounded by the same hardware capability development competes for. CredteamC_{\mathrm{redteam}} is the cost of adversarially testing the result, priced in expert-hours and bounded by…

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Learn the underlying idea

Addition combines quantities; subtraction measures the signed difference between them. Parentheses show what is combined before the rest of the expression is evaluated.

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