The effort to align and control modern AI systems is gaining momentum, driven by the need to ensure these technologies serve humanity's best interests. AI alignment involves encoding human values and goals into AI models to make them reliable, safe, and helpful. This interdisciplinary field grapples with both ethical considerations, such as whose values should be encoded, and technical challenges, including how to effectively implement these values within AI systems.
Key to AI alignment are robustness, interpretability, controllability, and ethicality. Methods such as reinforcement learning from human feedback, synthetic data, and red teaming are employed to align AI systems with human values. The UK's AI Security Institute is collaborating with global partners on the Alignment Project, backed by £15 million in funding, to accelerate progress in AI control and alignment research. This initiative aims to develop control protocols and evaluation methods to prevent unsafe actions by AI systems, addressing the urgent need for coordinated global action to ensure the long-term safety of citizens in the face of rapidly advancing AI capabilities.
As AI systems become more powerful, current control methods may prove insufficient. Research is focusing on monitoring untrusted AI systems and restricting their affordances to mitigate potential risks. The goal is to ensure that transformative AI systems serve humanity reliably and safely, addressing concerns that misaligned systems could act in ways beyond our control, with profound global implications.
