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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Alignment 201 curriculum, published by Richard Ngo on October 12, 2022 on The AI Alignment Forum. This curriculum, a follow-up to the Alignment Fundamentals curriculum (the ‘101’ to this 201 curriculum), aims to give participants enough knowledge about alignment to understand the frontier of current research discussions. It assumes that participants have read through the Alignment Fundamentals curriculum, taken a course on deep learning, and taken a course on reinforcement learning (or have an equivalent level of knowledge). Although these are the basic prerequisites, we expect that most people who intend to work on alignment should only read through the full curriculum after they have significantly more ML experience than listed above, since upskilling via their own ML engineering or research projects should generally be a higher priority for early-career alignment researchers. When reading this curriculum, it’s worth remembering that the field of alignment aims to shape the goals of systems that don’t yet exist; and so alignment research is often more speculative than research in other fields. You shouldn’t assume that there’s a consensus about the usefulness of any given research direction; instead, it’s often worth developing your own views about whether techniques discussed in this curriculum might plausibly scale up to help align AGI. The curriculum was compiled, and is maintained, by Richard Ngo. For now, it’s primarily intended to be read independently; once we’ve run a small pilot program, we’ll likely extend it to a discussion-based course. Curriculum overview Week 1: Further understanding the problemWeek 2: Decomposing tasks for better supervisionWeek 3: Training on unrestricted adversarial examplesWeek 4: InterpretabilityWeek 5: Reasoning about ReasoningWeeks 6 & 7 (Track 1): Eliciting Latent KnowledgeWeeks 6 & 7 (Track 2): Agent FoundationsWeeks 6 & 7 (Track 3): Science of Deep LearningWeeks 8 & 9: Literature Review or Project Proposal Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.