AI alignment often gets discussed at the level of civilization, existential risk, and saving humanity. That concern is understandable, and it matters. But if we only talk about alignment as a distant research problem, we miss the alignment work we can do right now, inside our teams, products, and daily decisions. In our world, alignment is not a theory. It is a practice. Ethics is not a poster on a wall. It is a set of repeatable behaviors that shape what AI does, what we allow it to touch, and how we respond when it gets things wrong. ------------- Context: Why This Conversation Keeps Getting Stuck ------------- When someone asks for tips on alignment and ethics, two unhelpful things often happen. Some people dismiss the concern as hype or doom, because it feels abstract. Others lean into fear, because it feels big and uncontrollable. Both reactions make it harder to do the real work. The reality is that there are two layers of alignment. One is frontier alignment, the long-horizon research that tries to ensure increasingly powerful models remain safe and controllable in the broadest sense. Most of us are not directly shaping that layer day to day, although it is important and worthy of serious work. The other layer is operational alignment, which is how we align AI systems with our intent, our values, our policies, and our responsibility in real workplaces. This layer is not abstract at all. It is the difference between a team that adopts AI with confidence and a team that adopts AI with accidental harm. We do not have to choose between caring about humanity-level questions and being practical. We can hold both. In fact, operational alignment is one of the most optimistic things we can do, because it builds the organizational muscle of responsibility. It turns concern into competence. ------------- Insight 1: Alignment Starts With Intent, Not Capability ------------- A lot of ethical trouble begins with a simple mistake, we adopt AI because it can do something, not because we have clearly decided what it should do.

I was up at 4:35am this morning… on a Sunday… diving head first into work. And the truth is — it didn’t feel like grinding at all. Because when you love what you’re building, when you know it’s stretching you as a man, when it’s tied to being in service to your family and making a real impact… the work hits different. It stops feeling like pressure. It starts feeling like purpose. I don’t get excited about being busy. I get excited about growing. About becoming more disciplined. More focused. More capable than I was yesterday. That’s what fuels me. Not the hours. Not the grind. The progress. So if you’re in a season where you’re putting in the reps — don’t just ask yourself how hard you’re working. Ask yourself who the work is helping you become. Because when the mission is bigger than you…even a 4:35am Sunday start feels like a privilege.

This week, I show you how to use Claude's new Interactive Reponses, breaks down AI ads at the Superb Owl and how ads in ChatGPT work (for now), reviews our testing results comparing GPT-5.3-codex and Claude Opus 4.6, and way more. Enjoy!