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Alignment

Allineamento

Alignment is the set of techniques and principles aimed at making an AI system genuinely pursue human goals and values, rather than a distorted interpretation of them. Imagine training a dog to fetch the newspaper: if you are imprecise, it might bring any paper it finds on the street. With AI the risk is similar but amplified: a naively optimized model can meet the letter of the goal you gave it while betraying its spirit. Alignment tries to close this gap between what we ask and what we truly mean, making the system helpful, honest and harmless even in situations designers never foresaw.

Definition

Alignment matters because the more capable models become, the more serious their deviations can be. It is the heart of AI safety: a powerful but misaligned model is dangerous precisely because of its skill.

Related terms

• Constitutional AI
• RLHF
• Red teaming
• Sycophancy
• Guardrails

More in AI Fundamentals

• LLM (Large Language Model)
• Token
• Context Window
• Temperature
• AI Hallucination
• Fine-tuning
• RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation)
• Embedding

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