“The Open Problems of the AI Alignment Field and their Cruxes” by Gunnar_Zarncke
“The Open Problems of the AI Alignment Field and their Cruxes” by Gunnar_Zarncke  
Podcast: LessWrong (30+ Karma)
Published On: Fri Aug 07 2026
Description: Previous: AI Safety Interventions TL;DR: I made an overview of the open problems of AI alignment that reveals cruxes within those open problems and missed opportunities for formalization and collaboration. And CEV may deserve a second look. Epistemic status: Trying too much in too little time. I'm confident I have identified and modeled significant structure within the alignment field, but I urgently need feedback on specific gaps and this post is largely a call for that. My work was LLM-assisted, but no part of this post was LLM-written, except for the crux summary and the Lean code. Recently, Chi Nguyen and peterbarnett said: PSA: Almost nobody is directly working on superintelligent alignment. I have been around in the field since the old days of LW 1.0 and thought: that can't be true. I mean, so many people seem to be working on it. I thought I was working on it. But was I? The PSA made me think back on what I was actually working on. It was Steven Byrnes who came up with a research agenda I could actually contribute to, which led me to founding project aintelope in 2022 (PS. It is still going). And a while [...] The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: August 6th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/quC3LLPXCashfnKZY/the-open-problems-of-the-ai-alignment-field-and-their-cruxes --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.