> That's one of the big problems with any kind of AI alignment or safety work.

That's why I found this announcement interesting, with regard to its discussion of alignment. Alignment as you're talking about here centers around ethics and a moral framework and is so named because a lot of the early LLM folks were big into "artificial general intelligence" and the fear that the AI will take over the world or whatever.

But fundamentally, and at a technical level, the "alignment" step is just additional training on top of the pre-training of the gigantic corpus of text. The pre-training kind of teaches it the world model and English, and "alignment" turns it into a question and answer bot that can "think" and use tools.

In other words, there's plenty of non-controversial "alignment" improvements that can be made, and indeed the highlight of this announcement is that it's now less susceptible to prompt injection (which, yes, is alignment!). Other improvements could be how well it uses tools, follows instructions, etc.