In Production: What Alignment Does and Doesn’t Guarantee

The domain’s production capstone: the behavior profile you inherit with every model, the gap between aligned and safe-for-your-app, and how to test before you trust.

Content last verified 2026-09.

Lessons

1. What You Inherit
2. The Guarantee Gap
3. Choosing and Testing a Post-trained Model

Sources

• Ouyang et al. (2022) — Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback (InstructGPT)
• Bai et al. (2022) — Constitutional AI: Harmlessness from AI Feedback
• Gao, Schulman & Hilton (2022) — Scaling Laws for Reward Model Overoptimization