To safely deploy powerful, general-purpose artificial intelligence in the future, we need to ensure that machine learning models act in accordance with human intentions. This challenge has become known as the alignment problem.

A scalable solution to the alignment problem needs to work on tasks where model outputs are difficult or time-consuming for humans to evaluate. To test scalable alignment techniques, we trained a model to summarize entire books, as shown in the following samples.^A Our model works by first summarizing small sections of a book, then summarizing those summaries into a higher-level summary, and so on.