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 · 8
Date Any time
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[Advanced Intro to AI Alignment] 2. What Values May an AI Learn? — 4 Key Problems
Educational post analysing what values a model-based RL critic trained on human feedback might learn, arguing reward-prediction and simple proxies like 'say what the user believes' can outcompete honesty and niceness.
1 item
[Advanced Intro to AI Alignment] 1. Goal-Directed Reasoning and Why It Matters
Introductory post arguing that capable AIs will have goal-directed structure modeled by a thinking loop and actor-model-critic RL, and that most values lead to human extinction absent careful alignment.
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[Advanced Intro to AI Alignment] 0. Overview and Foundations
An introductory overview of an alignment sequence that lays out the core alignment problem, goal-directed reasoning, value generalization difficulties, orthogonality, and intelligence explosion dynamics.
2 items
AI’s goals may not match ours
An introductory article explaining the alignment problem: why AI values are hard to inspect, specify and reliably instill in systems that may become smarter than humans.
AI may pursue goals
An intro article arguing that capable AI systems will likely become goal-pursuing agents rather than remaining tools, and that aligning their goals with ours is uncertain.
2 items
The road from human-level to superintelligent AI may be short
An AISafety.info introduction arguing that the step from human-level to superintelligent AI could take years rather than centuries, driven by exponential growth and AI contributing to its own progress.
Human-level is not the limit
An introductory AI-safety explainer arguing that AI systems could surpass human intelligence through advantages in size, speed, replication, self-modification and dedication, making superintelligence a serious near-term concern.