The Iliad Intensive Course Materials (April 2026)
Releases course materials for the Iliad Intensive, a month-long AI alignment course covering alignment, learning theory, mechanistic interpretability, debate, and agent foundations.
Research
LessWrong
AI research and discussion on LessWrong. www.lesswrong.com
AI (2,246)Interpretability (ML & AI) (225)AI Control (141)AI Governance (101)AI Evaluations (91)Chain-of-Thought Alignment (46)AI Risk (33)AI Safety (31)AI Takeoff (29)AI-Assisted Alignment (22)AI Rights / Welfare (20)AI Alignment Fieldbuilding (19)AI Timelines (19)Constitutional AI (15)AI Psychology (14)Dealmaking (AI) (14)Regulation and AI Risk (14)AI Benchmarking (13)Jailbreaking (AIs) (13)AI Alignment Intro Materials (11)Alignment Pretraining (11)Slowing Down AI (10)Aligned AI Proposals (9)Debate (AI safety technique) (9)AI Capabilities (8)AI Development Pause (8)OpenAI (8)Aligned AI Role-Model Fiction (7)Human-AI Safety (7)Threat Models (AI) (7)AI Oversight (6)AI Sentience (6)AI Safety Cases (5)AI "Agent" Scaffolds (4)AI arms race (4)AI Safety Camp (4)AI Safety Public Materials (4)Open Source AI (4)Transformative AI (4)Adversarial Examples (AI) (3)Adversarial Training (3)AI Alignment (3)AI Boxing (Containment) (3)AI Persuasion (3)AI Risk Concrete Stories (3)AI Risk Skepticism (3)AI Success Models (3)Guaranteed Safe AI (3)Sandbagging (AI) (3)AI Consciousness (2)AI Misuse (2)AI Racing (2)AI Spiralism / AI Psychosis (2)Frontier AI Companies (2)Grants & Fundraising Opportunities (2)PauseAI (2)Prosaic Alignment (2)Public Reactions to AI (2)Whole Brain Emulation (2)AI Auditing (1)AI Ethics (1)AI Lab Self-Immolation (1)AI Questions Open Threads (1)AI Robustness (1)AI Services (CAIS) (1)AI-Fizzle (1)AIXI (1)Blackmail / Extortion (1)Brainstorming (1)Power Seeking (AI) (1)
Focus All
Topic Theory
Source LessWrong · 5
Date Any time
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Should we align AI with maternal instinct?
A philosophical essay critiquing Hinton's maternal-instinct metaphor for alignment and proposing a relationship-building, repair-oriented framework instead of control or instinct.
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Why Eliminating Deception Won’t Align AI
Argues deception is a symptom of costly honesty and proposes structural design affordances and relational repair for prosaic AI systems, without addressing catastrophic deceptive alignment.
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Cognitive Exhaustion and Engineered Trust: Lessons from My Gym
An exploratory essay arguing AI safety should be built through affordance-based, modular architectures rather than post-hoc patches like RLHF, illustrated by a gym and factory analogy and an unproven concept called Distributed Neural Architecture.
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Thin Alignment Can't Solve Thick Problems
Philosophical essay arguing current alignment relies on thin ethical concepts like honesty and harmlessness, and proposing thick, pluralistic alignment that captures context-dependent values.