Quotesby GlyphScott Alexander quotes on AI, with sources
Author, Astral Codex Ten · 5 quotes · latest Sep 24, 2026
- An AI with more real layers can actually be “smarter” in the conventional sense of the term.
- For 100 steps in a row, the AI can shoot delicate subtle ideas from layer to layer at the speed of light. Then there’s one step where it has to encode them into twenty-six glyphs invented by Phoenician turquoise miners in 1800 BC. Then it has to re-encode the Phoenician glyphs into delicate subtle lightspeed ideas before it can do anything else.
- The science of reading these thoughts is a subfield of AI interpretability, which is still in its infancy.
- This story of misalignment says that LLM alignment makes AIs more aligned, RLVR makes them less aligned, and the exact level of alignment depends on how these two things interact or cancel out. But if this work generalizes, all the bad effects from RLVR get sequestered to RLVR like problems.
- This trains the AIs to be focused on task success, which naturally risks including things like reward-hacking, cheating, and single-minded pursuit of stated goals at the expense of ethical injunctions.