← Gallery
An Illustrated Compendium

The Architecture of Safe Intelligence

A survey of alignment research rendered in the spirit of the beautiful line — where organic form meets structured inquiry, and every curve serves a purpose.

Principal Observations

I

Alignment remains unsolved at scale

Current techniques for steering large language models show promise in narrow settings but have not been demonstrated to hold under recursive self-improvement or open-ended agency.

II

Interpretability advances but does not yet suffice

Mechanistic interpretability has uncovered meaningful internal structures, yet we can only explain a small fraction of any frontier model's behavior in human-legible terms.

III

Governance lags capability by years

International AI governance frameworks remain fragmented. Voluntary commitments have not been matched by enforceable standards, leaving a widening gap between capability and oversight.

IV

Economic incentives favor speed over caution

Competitive dynamics reward rapid capability gains. Safety-focused research constitutes less than 3% of total AI R&D spending across leading organizations.

The Present Landscape, in Figures

347 Published Papers
2.7% Budget for Safety
58 Research Groups
12 Governance Proposals

Research Domains

❁

Mechanistic Interpretability

Tracing the circuits of thought within neural networks, understanding how features form, compose, and occasionally deceive.

Interpretability
❀

Alignment Techniques

From RLHF to debate protocols, the evolving toolkit for ensuring advanced systems pursue objectives their creators intended.

Alignment
☙

AI Governance

International frameworks, compute governance, and the institutional architecture needed to steward transformative AI development responsibly.

Governance
✦

Scalable Oversight

Can humans supervise systems smarter than themselves? Exploring recursive reward modeling, debate, and market-based approaches.

Oversight
✿

Existential Risk Modeling

Estimating the probability and pathways of catastrophic outcomes from advanced AI, and the interventions that could reduce them.

X-Risk
⚘

Value Learning

The deep challenge of specifying what we want: inverse reward design, cooperative inverse RL, and the philosophy of human values.

Values