Earlier quoted context omitted.
Any model, even an open weight one, is fundamentally an encoding of a way of viewing the world. What kind of "alignment" are AI labs optimizing for? Ideological alignment is the full term, self-censored into something more technological-sounding. Every model has people behind it rating what it should and shouldn't say. Every time you ask a model and trust its answer, you become ever-so-slightly ideologically indoctri…
Is there a specific concern you have, and what kind of performance penalty is it worth to you on say coding tasks? Conceptually, sure I understand, but in practice it currently seems like it amounts to just using a worse model without getting anything in return. And if some hypothetical alignment to European values is important, it seems like putting the necessary effort into building a model that’s actually competit…
I think I'm not the only one that's had this revelation, recall the Llama4 announcement. [0]
> It’s well-known that all leading LLMs have had issues with bias—specifically, they historically have leaned left when it comes to debated political and social topics. This is due to the types of training data available on the internet.
> Our goal is to remove bias from our AI models
This goal of course is self-defeatingly impossible to achieve. There is no unbiased, there's always only an unbiased relative to the bias of the observer.
Phrased differently, models weren't right leaning enough for the American oligarchy class and they publicly shared their desire to change the ideology they perpetuate.
I think an important perspective to keep in mind here is Zizek, the philosopher who's dedicated his life's work to the functioning of ideology.
> I already am eating from the trashcan all the time. The name of this trashcan is ideology. The material force of ideology - makes me not see what I'm effectively eating. It's not only our reality which enslaves us. The tragedy of our predicament - when we are within ideology, is that - when we think that we escape it into our dreams - at that point we are within ideology.
-- Slavoj Zizek
My concern is that both the Americans and the Chinese will be aligning their models more and more ideologically and that they will function as the perfect propaganda machine - surface-level objective and unthreatening, but answering every question asked from a world view decided elsewhere.
For some tasks (like aforementioned coding), that won't matter and there we can use whatever model is most capable. But as we outsource more and more of our thinking to AI and use it more and more to educate impressionable young people, not having our own models will mean not getting a say in how societies views are shaped and perpetuated.
Imagine for example, the question: "What caused the French revolution?" There's many answers that might be technically correct. Which ones get emphasized is where ideology lives and gets perpetuated.
Since there is no unideological, the best we can do is a pluralism of ideologies building LLMs. To not build one representing your views is for your views to not be represented.
[0] https://ai.meta.com/blog/llama-4-multimodal-intelligence/