Collective alignment: public input on our Model Spec

No single person or institution should define how an ideal AI should behave for everyone.

To fulfill our mission of ensuring that AGI benefits all of humanity, OpenAI needs to build systems that reflect the wide range of values and priorities of all the people we serve. We approach this in many ways, including external feedback forms, expert input, and global listening sessions. Another way we do this is through collective alignment, a research effort that gathers a variety of perspectives on how our models should behave. The question of which values an AI system should follow is complex and we don’t have all the answers, especially in subjective, contentious or high-stakes situations. As AI becomes more capable and integrated into people’s lives, it’s important that their default behavior—and the boundaries of personalization—reflects a wide range of perspectives and values.

There will likely never be a single AI behavior set that suits everyone’s needs. This is why we also invest in personalization and custom personalities. However, the defaults of a model are powerful, and we would like input from the public to help us shape them.

Today, we share a few early steps that we’ve taken as part of the collective alignment research direction. We collected global input from over 1,000 people worldwide, transformed it into actionable guidelines, and went through internal reviews to make updates to our Model Spec. In many cases, participant preferences aligned with the Model Spec as written. In other cases, disagreements highlighted wording that could be clarified, or were transformed into proposals for internal review. We adopted some changes, deferred others to upcoming work, and set aside others based on principle or feasibility. Finally, we are sharing our public inputs dataset for the AI research ecosystem to HuggingFace⁠(opens in a new window) to enable future work in this direction. We include some samples from our dataset here: