Equation 3 · Part 2 · What Alignment Actually Costs
subscript
subscript
What this part means
The lower label selects a particular version, component, or indexed member of the quantity. For example, x₀ and xₜ can be values at different positions.
Its job in the formula
A subscript distinguishes a version, component, step, or member of a quantity. It does not automatically mean multiplication.
Full expression→subscript→Article meaning
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.
Open the illustrated subscripts: which member of a family? guide →
The article lists its research sources here.