AI / ML

Constitutional AI

An alignment technique developed by Anthropic where an AI model is guided by a 'constitution'—a set of explicit principles defining allowed and disallowed behavior—rather than relying solely on human feedback. The model critiques and revises its own outputs against these principles. Constitutional Classifiers extend this by training input/output classifiers that detect policy violations at low compute cost.

IDconstitutional-aiAliasCAI

Plain meaning

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An alignment technique developed by Anthropic where an AI model is guided by a 'constitution'—a set of explicit principles defining allowed and disallowed behavior—rather than relying solely on human feedback. The model critiques and revises its own outputs against these principles. Constitutional Classifiers extend this by training input/output classifiers that detect policy violations at low compute cost.

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Constitutional AI (constitutional-ai)
Category: AI / ML
Definition: An alignment technique developed by Anthropic where an AI model is guided by a 'constitution'—a set of explicit principles defining allowed and disallowed behavior—rather than relying solely on human feedback. The model critiques and revises its own outputs against these principles. Constitutional Classifiers extend this by training input/output classifiers that detect policy violations at low compute cost.
Aliases: CAI
Related: AI Alignment, RLHF (Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback)
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AI Alignment

The practice of ensuring AI systems behave according to human intentions and values—being helpful, harmless, and honest. Alignment encompasses training-time techniques (RLHF, Constitutional AI, DPO), inference-time guardrails, and evaluation through red teaming. As models become more capable, alignment becomes critical to prevent harmful content generation or manipulation by bad actors.

Branch

RLHF (Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback)

A training technique that aligns LLM outputs with human preferences. Process: (1) train a reward model from human comparisons of outputs, (2) use reinforcement learning (PPO) to optimize the LLM against the reward model. RLHF makes models more helpful, harmless, and honest. Used by Claude, ChatGPT, and other assistants. Alternatives include DPO (Direct Preference Optimization) and Constitutional AI.

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AI / ML

AI Alignment

The practice of ensuring AI systems behave according to human intentions and values—being helpful, harmless, and honest. Alignment encompasses training-time techniques (RLHF, Constitutional AI, DPO), inference-time guardrails, and evaluation through red teaming. As models become more capable, alignment becomes critical to prevent harmful content generation or manipulation by bad actors.

AI / ML

RLHF (Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback)

A training technique that aligns LLM outputs with human preferences. Process: (1) train a reward model from human comparisons of outputs, (2) use reinforcement learning (PPO) to optimize the LLM against the reward model. RLHF makes models more helpful, harmless, and honest. Used by Claude, ChatGPT, and other assistants. Alternatives include DPO (Direct Preference Optimization) and Constitutional AI.

AI / ML

Context Window

The maximum amount of text (measured in tokens) an LLM can process in a single interaction. Larger windows enable processing more code/documentation at once. Sizes vary: GPT-4 (128K tokens), Claude (200K tokens), Gemini (1M+ tokens). One token ≈ 4 characters in English. Context window limits affect how much codebase an AI can analyze in a single request.

AI / ML

Claude Code

Anthropic's terminal-based agentic coding tool launched in early 2025 alongside Claude 3.7 Sonnet. It accepts natural-language commands in the shell and autonomously performs multi-step coding tasks including file editing, git operations, test execution, and large-scale refactoring using a 200K token context window. Claude Code can be extended with hooks, MCP servers, and custom slash commands for project-specific workflows.

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AI / MLai-alignment

AI Alignment

The practice of ensuring AI systems behave according to human intentions and values—being helpful, harmless, and honest. Alignment encompasses training-time techniques (RLHF, Constitutional AI, DPO), inference-time guardrails, and evaluation through red teaming. As models become more capable, alignment becomes critical to prevent harmful content generation or manipulation by bad actors.

AI / MLrlhf

RLHF (Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback)

A training technique that aligns LLM outputs with human preferences. Process: (1) train a reward model from human comparisons of outputs, (2) use reinforcement learning (PPO) to optimize the LLM against the reward model. RLHF makes models more helpful, harmless, and honest. Used by Claude, ChatGPT, and other assistants. Alternatives include DPO (Direct Preference Optimization) and Constitutional AI.

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AI / ML

LLM (Large Language Model)

A neural network trained on vast text corpora to understand and generate human language. LLMs (GPT-4, Claude, Llama, Gemini) use transformer architectures with billions of parameters. They power chatbots, code generation, summarization, and reasoning tasks. In blockchain development, LLMs assist with smart contract writing, audit review, documentation, and code explanation.

AI / ML

Transformer

The neural network architecture underlying modern LLMs, introduced in 'Attention Is All You Need' (2017). Transformers use self-attention mechanisms to process input sequences in parallel (unlike recurrent networks). Key components: multi-head attention, positional encoding, feedforward layers, and layer normalization. Variants include encoder-only (BERT), decoder-only (GPT), and encoder-decoder (T5).

AI / ML

Attention Mechanism

A neural network component that allows models to weigh the relevance of different parts of the input when producing output. Self-attention computes query-key-value dot products across all positions, enabling each token to 'attend' to every other token. Multi-head attention runs multiple attention functions in parallel. Attention is O(n²) in sequence length, driving context window research.

AI / ML

Foundation Model

A large AI model trained on broad data that can be adapted for many downstream tasks. Foundation models (GPT-4, Claude, Llama 3, Gemini) are pre-trained on internet-scale text/code and can be fine-tuned, prompted, or used via APIs for specific applications. The term emphasizes that one base model serves as the foundation for diverse use cases rather than training task-specific models.