Meaning Alignment Institute

The Meaning Alignment Institute researches how to align AI, markets, and democracies with what people value.

[Oliver Klingefjord @klingefjord]

@alexolegimas hopes AI does commodities, humans do the relational work (care, connection). but markets at scale sometimes sell us cheap stand-ins for experience goods (where relational work often lives) due to incomplete contracting.

some thoughts on the limits of competition:

[Oliver Klingefjord @klingefjord]

The current optimistic story about AGI and labor is something like: machines do the commodities, humans do the relational stuff (care, connection, hosting).

I think this misses something about how relational labor works in markets at scale.

Wrote an essay about it 👇

[Ryan Lowe 🥞 @ryan_t_lowe]

a small update on what we've been up to with @meaningaligned: we're convening researchers to think about what we're calling "AGI Institutions".

we believe roughly that: (1) good futures with powerful AI systems will require an entirely new institutional landscape, a shift of a similar magnitude to the founding of the US; (2) this will require a process of deliberate invention, drawing folk from social choice theory, mechanism design, AI, philosophy, etc; (3) things are moving pretty fast so we better, ya know, get the ball rolling.

we hosted a one-day workshop on this in Paris (co-located with IASEAI), and it was a huge success!! we wrote up a little bit about it in a blog post (link below).

we'll be running more of these, and also have some other cool projects that we'll talk more about soon :). if you’re working on institution design for a world with powerful AI and want to be involved, reach out to us at [email protected]

[Joe Edelman 🥞 @edelwax]

Folks, we need some AGI-ready institutions. Can you make them by next week?

[Oliver Klingefjord @klingefjord]

OpenAI and Anthropic seem to have diverged on what makes AI trustworthy.

@OpenAI bet on compliance with rules, @AnthropicAI bet on character.

In a new blogpost, I argue Anthropic's move is the right one: character is a precondition for integrity, and integrity is what you need when the rules run out.

(link below)

[David Duvenaud @DavidDuvenaud]

@ryan_t_lowe of @meaningaligned spoke on "Co-Aligning AI and Institutions". Their “Full-stack Alignment” work argues that alignment strategy needs to consider the institutions in which AI is developed and deployed.

paper: https://t.co/LtB975QdO9
video: https://t.co/URGJYUAGH1

[Joe Edelman 🥞 @edelwax]

Jakob’s lab at Oxford would be an amazing place to work on Full-Stack Alignment!

[Philipp Koralus @PhilippKoralus]

Excited for the launch of the position paper that resulted from our Oxford HAI Lab 2025 Thick Models of Choice workshop !

[xuan (ɕɥɛn / sh-yen) @xuanalogue]

Ever since I started thinking seriously about AI value alignment in 2016-7, I've been frustrated by the inadequacy of utility+RL theory to account for the richness of human values.

Glad to be part of a larger team now moving beyond those thin theories towards thicker ones.

[Oliver Klingefjord @klingefjord]

Aligning an AI system, or a recommender system, in isolation is playing whack-a-mole. The real issue we're facing is "full-stack", and requires solutions that tackles the problems on all levels

[Meaning Alignment Institute @meaningaligned]

🥞

[Ryan Lowe 🥞 @ryan_t_lowe]

I guess now is also a good time to announce that I've officially joined @meaningaligned!!

I'll be working on field building for full-stack alignment -- helping nurture this effort into a research community with excellent vibes that gets shit done

weeeeeeeeeee 🚀🚀

[Sydney Levine @sydneymlevine]

Excited to be part of this exciting vision!

[Joe Edelman 🥞 @edelwax]

In 2017, I was working to change FB News Feed's recommender to use “thick models of value” (per the paper we just released). @finkd even promised he'd make Facebook “Time Well Spent”.

That effort was thwarted by the (1) market dynamics of the attention economy, (2) the US congress’ focus on Cambridge Analytica, and (3) @meta's corporate governance.

The problem was bigger than I'd thought: what we've now termed “full-stack alignment.”

[Iason Gabriel @IasonGabriel]

Check out this great new initiative + paper led by @ryan_t_lowe, @edelwax, @xuanalogue, @klingefjord & the fine folks @meaningaligned!

Using rich representations of value we aim to make headway on some of the most pressing AI alignment challenges!

See: https://t.co/VWypZmCJY4

[Ryan Lowe 🥞 @ryan_t_lowe]

Introducing: Full-Stack Alignment 🥞

A research program dedicated to co-aligning AI systems *and* institutions with what people value.

It's the most ambitious project I've ever undertaken.

Here's what we're doing: 🧵

[Ryan Lowe 🥞 @ryan_t_lowe]

yay!!!!! a concrete proposal by @meaningaligned for how we can re-align markets with what people really care about, using 'market intermediaries'

more to come soon 😈

[Joe Edelman 🥞 @edelwax]

A big part of why AI is threatening is: market forces. Just look at what the 'attention economy' did to social media, or the short-term wins of LLM sycophancy, or the product races among AI labs, or the markets for AI boyfriends and girlfriends.

What can we do about this?

[Meaning Alignment Institute @meaningaligned]

https://t.co/qWnDBrHHoJ

[Meaning Alignment Institute @meaningaligned]

Markets optimize for engagement, not human flourishing. In an AI-driven economy, this reduces humans to passive, dependent consumers without meaning or agency. AI-enabled "market intermediaries" could fix this.

New blogpost 👇