AI Glossary Term

What is Alignment Tax?

Definition

The extra cost in time, compute, or product velocity required to make systems safer and more controllable.

Related terms

AI Alignment
The work of making AI systems behave according to human intentions, values, and safety constraints.
Autonomous System
A system that can make decisions and act with limited or no direct human control in real time.
Compute
The processing resources required to train and run models, often measured in FLOPS or GPU hours.
Feature Engineering
Designing or transforming input variables to make learning easier and more effective.
Inference-Time Compute
The amount of processing power consumed while producing each response.
Machine Learning (ML)
Methods that allow systems to learn patterns from data and improve over time.

Learn more in our free guides

AI AlignmentGlow-TTS Monotonic AlignmentWhisper Timestamped Word AlignmentAI in Tax and Accounting
Browse the full AI GlossaryExplore all free AI guides