My understanding is that they have very short (by my lights) timelines which recently updated them toward pushing much more toward just trying to automate alignment research rather than thinking about the theory.

Haven’t yet had a chance to read the article, but from verbal conversations I’d guess they’d endorse something similar (though probably not every word) to Thomas Larsen’s opinion on this in Footnote 5 in this post:

Answer: I see a categorical distinction between trying to align agentic and oracle AIs. Conjecture is trying only for oracle LLMs, trained without any RL pressure giving them goals, which seems way safer. OpenAI doing recursive reward modeling / IDA type schemes involves creating agentic AGIs and therefore faces also a lot more alignment issues like convergent instrumental goals, power seeking, goodharting, inner alignment failure, etc.

I think inner alignment can be a problem with LLMs trained purely in a self-supervised fashion (e.g., simulacra becoming aware of their surroundings), but I anticipate it to only be a problem with further capabilities. I think RL trained GPT-6 is a lot more likely to be an x-risk than GPT-6 trained only to do text prediction.