Being good at research and being good at high level strategic thinking are just fairly different skillsets!
Neel, thank you, especially for the humility in acknowledging how hard it is to know whether a strategic take is any good.
Your post made me realise I’ve been holding back on a framing I’ve found useful (from when I worked as a matchmaker and a relationship coach), thinking about alignment less as a performance problem, and more as a relationship problem. We often fixate on traits like intelligence, speed, obedience but we forget to ask, what kind of relationship are we building with AI? If we started there, maybe we’d optimise for collaboration rather than control?
P.S. I don’t come from a research background, but my work in behaviour and systems design gives me a practical lens on alignment, especially around how relationships shape trust, repair, and long-term coherence.
Neel, thank you, especially for the humility in acknowledging how hard it is to know whether a strategic take is any good.
Your post made me realise I’ve been holding back on a framing I’ve found useful (from when I worked as a matchmaker and a relationship coach), thinking about alignment less as a performance problem, and more as a relationship problem. We often fixate on traits like intelligence, speed, obedience but we forget to ask, what kind of relationship are we building with AI? If we started there, maybe we’d optimise for collaboration rather than control?
P.S. I don’t come from a research background, but my work in behaviour and systems design gives me a practical lens on alignment, especially around how relationships shape trust, repair, and long-term coherence.