AI / LLM Basics Interview Questions
What is Alignment in the context of LLMs?
Alignment refers to the broader effort of making a model's behavior match what humans actually want, helpful, honest, and safe responses, rather than just fluent or plausible-sounding text.
- Pretraining alone only teaches a model to predict likely next text, with no built-in sense of what's actually helpful or appropriate
- Alignment techniques like instruction tuning and RLHF are what layer on that sense of appropriate behavior
- An unaligned base model can be fluent yet unhelpful, evasive, or willing to produce harmful content if simply prompted the right way
Alignment is an ongoing area of active research, since teaching a model nuanced human values and judgment turns out to be considerably harder than teaching it grammar and facts.
What does alignment aim to make a model's behavior match?
Does pretraining alone teach a model what's helpful or appropriate?
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