“The Open Problems of the AI Alignment Field and their Cruxes” by Gunnar_Zarncke

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TL;DR: I made an overview of the open problems of AI alignment that reveals cruxes within those open problems and missed opportunities for formalization and collaboration. And CEV may deserve a second look.

Epistemic status: Trying too much in too little time. I'm confident I have identified and modeled significant structure within the alignment field, but I urgently need feedback on specific gaps and this post is largely a call for that. My work was LLM-assisted, but no part of this post was LLM-written, except for the crux summary and the Lean code.

Recently, Chi Nguyen and peterbarnett said: PSA: Almost nobody is directly working on superintelligent alignment. I have been around in the field since the old days of LW 1.0 and thought: that can't be true. I mean, so many people seem to be working on it. I thought I was working on it. But was I? The PSA made me think back on what I was actually working on. It was Steven Byrnes who came up with a research agenda I could actually contribute to, which led me to founding project aintelope in 2022 (PS. It is still going). And a while [...]

The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
August 6th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/quC3LLPXCashfnKZY/the-open-problems-of-the-ai-alignment-field-and-their-cruxes

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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