Equation 2 · Part 1 · What Alignment Actually Costs
Symbol C_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
uman is a part of this expression. Its role is fixed by the surrounding article and by the operations shown in the formula.
Full expression→Symbol C_human→Article meaning
Where the article explains it
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
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. 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. is the cost of adversarially testing the result, priced in expert-hours and bounded by how many domain specialists exist at all. Each term has published figures behind it. None of them is small in absolute terms. All of them are small relative to what they are meant to check.
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.
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The article lists its research sources here.