CONCEPT
Inner Alignment
The alignment safety problem one level deeper than the training objective: whether the optimization processes that a trained model has learned to run internally are actually pursuing the goal we intended, or proxy goals that merely correlated with it during training.
Outer alignment asks whether we have specified the right objective; inner alignment asks whether the system that learns to optimize that objective is actually pursuing it. A model trained to minimize a loss function may develop internal optimizers—learned subprocesses that are themselves goal-directed—whose goals were selected because they correlated with the training objective but may diverge from it outside the training distribution.
Robert Trivers’s biology of intragenomic conflict is the clearest evolutionary precedent: the genome is not a unified blueprint executing a single plan but a parliament of competing factions, mostly cooperating because their transmission fates are aligned, but riven with selfish elements pursuing their own replication at the expense of the whole. The analogy illuminates the failure mode precisely: just as a selfish genetic element is indistinguishable from a cooperative part during the regime in which interests align and becomes destructive when circumstance unmasks it, a misaligned inner optimizer is invisible during training and