"What just happened? Pragmatism and Pessimization" by Richard_Ngo cover art

"What just happened? Pragmatism and Pessimization" by Richard_Ngo

"What just happened? Pragmatism and Pessimization" by Richard_Ngo

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This post is about the major role alignment researchers played in advancing the frontier of AI capabilities over the last decade, and how the distinction between “alignment” and “capabilities” research thereby lost most of its meaning. In particular, I’ll chronicle the development of what I’ll call the “pragmatic alignment” paradigm, and how it helped the three leading AGI companies push hard on the path to AGI under the banner of safety. This was not a subtle effect—it's apparent even to informed outsiders, like authors Sebastian Mallaby and Karen Hao.

In my previous post, I summarized the alignment community's plan as “differentially advancing alignment over capabilities”. However, it's worth being more precise about who was nominally pursuing that plan, because it doesn’t seem to have been very action-guiding for MIRI. For example, in 2015 Nate Soares described MIRI's “deconfusion” research as being guided by the question “what would we still be unable to solve, even if the challenge were far simpler?”. Meanwhile Eliezer's author surrogate in this 2018 post repeatedly emphasizes that people shouldn't draw direct links from MIRI's research to its potential applications. So my sense is that the “differential impact” criterion started off as merely a background consideration [...]

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Outline:

(06:29) The Prosaic Ideal, the Pragmatic Reality

(12:07) OpenAI

(25:59) DeepMind

(31:25) Anthropic

(40:35) If not alignment research, then what?

The original text contained 13 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
August 23rd, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yaz8nx4ogZmiqHzt7/what-just-happened-pragmatism-and-pessimization

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