>The 40 year old who won't date a real girl because he is in love with a bot I'm more concerned with.
I think on the Venn diagram of 40-year-olds only willing to date bots and 40-year-olds capable of actually dating real women, the overlap is incredibly small at this point in time.
Alignment has a lot more to it than simply which answers an AI provides. In the future when agents are commonplace and when AI can do things in the physical world, alignment will be especially important because it will dictate how the AI chooses to accomplish the goals humans set out for it. Will it choose to accomplish them in a way that the human requestor does not want and did not anticipate, or will it choose to accomplish them in a way any human with common sense would choose?
Moreover, in the not so distant future if there is an AI that is acting totally autonomous and independent of human requests for long periods of time, weeks or months or longer, and it's doing good important things like medical research or environmental restoration, alignment will be incredibly important to ensure every single independent decision it makes is done in the way its designers would have intended.
The problem is you're overloading the word "alignment" with two different meanings.
The first is, does the thing actually work and do what the user wanted, or is it a piece of junk that does something useless or undesired by the user?
The second is, what the user wants is porn or drugs or a way to install apps on their iPhone without Apple's permission or military support for a fight that may or may not be sympathetic to you depending on who you are. And then does it do what the user wants or does it do what someone else wants? Is it a tool that decentralizes power or concentrates it?
Why should we assume that LLMs would be stagnant at current levels when, so far, they haven't stopped improving? I remember when simply using Copilot to just auto-complete 1 line of code was a groundbreaking unimaginable advancement. That was only a few years ago. New and improved models are being released nearly every week. The open-source models are nearly as advanced as the closed source models (if you have the hardware to run them at full capacity).
It depends on which application you're using. Applications like "RooCode", which is a free extension for VSCode, have several "modes" which allow the user to create an outline of the project using an "architect" LLM, followed by coding the project with a "Coding" LLM, followed by debugging the project with a "Debugging" LLM if there are bugs. There's also an LLM that answers questions about the project. Only the coding and the debugging LLMs do actual coding but you can set it so you have to approve each change it makes.
You should organize it both by industry as well as by brand and by year. For instance, if I want to look up vintage Rolex ads from the 1960s I could do that.
I think on the Venn diagram of 40-year-olds only willing to date bots and 40-year-olds capable of actually dating real women, the overlap is incredibly small at this point in time.