Model organism
A small system studied closely enough that its failures teach you something general.
What it commits you to
Biology uses model organisms — fruit flies, mice — because their mechanisms are shared enough that findings transfer. Alignment borrows the idea to study small language models and toy agents, which are cheap to train, inspect and break. The risk is over-transferring: a phenomenon that only appears at small scale may not survive to the regime it is being used to reason about.
Which realms lean on this
Every realm has to keep a system honest. These are the terms that say out loud what the other kinds keep implicit.
alignment · 5 realms — The Benthamite Foundry, The Existential Wilds, The Longview Foundry, The Stoic Ramparts, The Ubuntu Weave.
See also
Weak-to-strong generalisation
alignmentA strong model trained on a weak supervisor's output generalising beyond its teacher.
Mechanistic interpretability
alignmentReverse-engineering the learned features inside a model rather than inferring them from outputs.
Emergent capability
technicalA capability that appears abruptly above a scale threshold rather than gradually.
Interpretability
alignmentThe effort to make what a model represents and computes legible to people.