# "Alignment Midtraining Cracks Under Pressure" by J Bostock, sidbaines, Daniel Tan, draganover, ma-rmartinez

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/lesswrong-curated-popular-5643401/alignment-midtraining-cracks-under-pressure-by-j-bostock-sidbaines-daniel-tan-draganover-ma-rmartinez
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/lesswrong-curated-popular-5643401/alignment-midtraining-cracks-under-pressure-by-j-bostock-sidbaines-daniel-tan-draganover-ma-rmartinez.md
Podcast: [LessWrong (Curated & Popular)](https://stenobird.com/podcast/lesswrong-curated-popular-5643401)
Published: 2026-09-23T19:45:21+00:00
Episode link: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2037297/episodes/19854741-alignment-midtraining-cracks-under-pressure-by-j-bostock-sidbaines-daniel-tan-draganover-ma-rmartinez.mp3
Audio file: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2037297/episodes/19854741-alignment-midtraining-cracks-under-pressure-by-j-bostock-sidbaines-daniel-tan-draganover-ma-rmartinez.mp3
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Duration seconds: 874

## Resource

TL;DR We stress-test alignment midtraining (AMT) across model and token budget scales. Our results suggest that midtraining cannot tackle the hard problems of AI alignment—namely distributional shift and reward underspecification in the presence of imperfect data. For instance, we test whether midtrained motivations are robust to finetuning which elicits competing motivations. In our setting, 190 million tokens of midtrained motivations are overpowered by a relatively tiny amount (~50 th...

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