Preference Alignment

Opening — Why this matters now AI adoption has entered its second, less glamorous phase. The first phase was easy to explain: make the model generate things. Emails, reports, code, dashboards, summaries, customer replies, compliance drafts, market notes, training content. Give the machine a prompt, admire the fluent output, and pretend the future has arrived because the paragraphs are well-spaced. ...

A leaderboard is a comforting object. It gives procurement teams, product managers, and slightly sleep-deprived founders the same small pleasure: a ranked list. Bigger number, better model. Lower rank, worse model. Decision made. Spreadsheet closed. Everyone can return to pretending vendor evaluation is objective. Unfortunately, benchmarks do not care what your business actually needs. ...