> Accepting as a premise that OpenAI is THE most advanced AI organization: if they can't do it [build aligned AI] without "the help of a more powerful AI", then nobody else can either.

I don't think this follows at all.

To build an aligned AI, it seems pretty obvious that:

1) You need more just than auto-regressive prediction and "be nice" prompts to be controlling the behavior of your AI - you need a built-in "2nd system" (cf limbic system, etc) with some innate aligned biases that can override this.

2) You need to avoid controlling generative behavior with RL, else you will end up with exactly what we are now seeing - reward-hungry goal-seekers (aka paperclip maximizers) that are one of the exact things you are trying to avoid. Reasoning should be based on prediction, not goal-seeking.

3) If you do not have some minimal safeguards in place (1 & 2 above), and especially if the AI has the ability to learn, then do not trust it in any situation where harm may ensue. You need an additional trusted external system, without ability to learn and become compromised, to monitor the AI, with the ability to block it immediately. Maybe you are happy protecting your PC from OpenClaw with just a sandbox, but the recent spate of external system hacks by frontier models proves we are already well past the point where such monitoring is needed for systems with internet access, especially given the UN-aligned goal-seeking nature of today's models.

I really don't think that 1) & 2) are that difficult to implement, or need a "powerful AI" to suggest - they are just common sense.