The Alignment Illusion: When Bigger Models Think Less Clearly
Opening — Why this matters now The current AI narrative is almost suspiciously convenient: scale the model, add more data, sprinkle in reinforcement learning, and intelligence will emerge—fully formed, aligned, and reliable. Except, as this paper quietly demonstrates, that assumption is increasingly fragile. As multimodal large language models (MLLMs) move into production environments—from financial analysis to medical diagnostics—the cost of “almost correct” reasoning becomes non-trivial. The gap between what models say and what they actually understand is no longer an academic curiosity. It is a business risk. ...