Astral Codex Ten

Alignment Research Center

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Alignment Research Center

Article

Alignment Research Center is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between May 20, 2021 and February 20, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “Paul Christiano will be founding his own nonprofit, the Alignment Research Center”; “founding his own nonprofit, the Alignment Research Center”; “ELK … run by the Alignment Research Center (including familiar names like Paul Christiano )“. It most often appears alongside Paul Christiano, GPT-3, OpenAI.

Metadata

  • Category: Organizations
  • Mention count: 4
  • Issue count: 4
  • First seen: May 20, 2021
  • Last seen: February 20, 2025

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Links For May
May 20, 2021 · Original source
35: Recent news in local AI alignment research space: most of OpenAI’s top alignment researchers, including Dario Amodei, Chris Olah, Jack Clark, and Paul Christano, left en masse for poorly-understood reasons (see speculation here). Dario Amodei is now working with a new nonprofit called Cooperative AI Foundation. Paul Christiano will be founding his own nonprofit, the Alignment Research Center (conflict of interest notice: I know Paul and think he is generally great); see also his ask-me-anything thread on Less Wrong here. Unrelatedly, local secretive AI alignment research group MIRI (Machine Intelligence Research Institute) is leaving the Bay Area for some small town with affordable land prices where they can maybe build a campus (they’re still trying to decide exactly where).
Inline links: left en masse for poorly-understood reasons, here, Cooperative AI Foundation, Alignment Research Center, his ask-me-anything thread on Less Wrong here, leaving the Bay Area
ELK And The Problem Of Truthful AI
July 26, 2022 · Original source
Extended far enough, this line of thinking leads to ELK (Eliciting Latent Knowledge), a technical report / contest / paradigm run by the Alignment Research Center (including familiar names like Paul Christiano).
Inline links: Eliciting Latent Knowledge, Paul Christiano
"Through A Glass Darkly" In Asterisk Magazine
June 26, 2023 · Original source
Crash Testing GPT-4: Before releasing GPT-4, OpenAI sent a preliminary version to the Alignment Research Center to test it for unsafe capabilities; the detail that made the news was how the AI managed to hire a gig worker to solve CAPTCHAs for it by pretending to be a blind person. Asterisk interviews Beth Barnes, leader of the team that ran those tests.
Inline links: Crash Testing GPT-4, made the news
Lives Of The Rationalist Saints
February 20, 2025 · Original source
St. Joanne of ARC had a resume so beautiful that Sam Altman, Demis Hassabis, and Elon Musk all sought her hand as employee. They became increasingly insistent that she choose one of them, and refused to take ‘no’ as an answer. She asked Paul Christiano what to do, and on his advice she called the three men together and said “I will make my decision once my simple twenty-line program finishes running”. After they agreed, she revealed that her program was calculating BusyBeaver(100), and they all admitted they were unworthy of her. She cut her hair, gave her jewelry to the poor, and joined the Alignment Research Center, where she discovered many important theorems. Some say Jane Street is named after her, although others attribute it to a St. Jane of Manhattan who is otherwise unrecorded.