Equation 20 · What Alignment Actually Costs
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Holding c roughly fixed at crowdworker wage rates, a falling p as RLHF hardens a model means the expected cost per discovered failure rises mechanically with every round of safety training — the same defensive work that red-teaming is meant to validate makes the next round of red-teaming more expensive per useful finding, not less.
Sources cited in the article section
- [5] Red Teaming Language Models to Reduce Harms: Methods, Scaling Behaviors, and Lessons Learned ↗
- [6] GPT-4 System Card ↗
- [7] Frontier Threats Red Teaming for AI Safety ↗
- [8] Generative Red Team Recap ↗
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