How to Design AIs That Understand What Humans Want: An Interview with Long Ouyang - Future of Life Institute

As artificial intelligence becomes more advanced, programmers will expect to talk to computers like they talk to humans. Instead of typing out long, complex code, we'll communicate with AI systems using natural language. With a current model called "program synthesis," humans can get computers to write code for them by giving them examples and demonstrations of concepts, but this model is limited. With program synthesis, computers are literalists: instead of reading between the lines and considering intentions, they just do what's literally true, and what's literally true isn't always what humans want. If you asked a computer for a word starting with the letter "a," for example, it might just return "a."