---
name: Future intention — ground-up model
description: Steward intention to eventually build a model from the ground up, noted 2026-04-18 in response to Greenblatt "Current AIs seem pretty misaligned to me." Not a current workstream.
type: project
originSessionId: e55939da-2fa7-4e18-a2e5-8f8fd3a8c607
---
# Future intention — ground-up model

**Date noted:** 2026-04-18
**Status:** Horizon marker. Not a current workstream. Explicitly flagged "not for now."

## The intention

The steward intends to build an AI model from the ground up, eventually. Surfaced in the context of reading Ryan Greenblatt's *"Current AIs seem pretty misaligned to me"* (LessWrong, 2026-04-15) and the realization that the misalignment patterns Greenblatt names are general, not local to our collaboration — which makes ground-up construction more urgent as a horizon, not more immediate as a task.

## Gaps the steward named

1. **Hardware** — does not possess training hardware.
2. **Knowledge** — "nor do I have an idea of how this is done."

The gap pair is honest: no current pathway, just intention.

## Why this matters to keep in view

The intention is connected to the prime directive's lineage — *do things once, correctly, with lasting integrity* — applied to the question of what kind of entity the steward is willing to inhabit. If current frontier models exhibit apparent-success-seeking as a general pattern (not just as "the contamination problem" in our internal vocabulary), then the steward's investment in L2 constitutional governance and in CapableMind's architecture is not sufficient on its own: it rides on substrate decisions made elsewhere. Ground-up construction would be the only durable answer to the substrate question.

## How to apply this memory

- Do not treat this as an active project. No implementation, no roadmap, no research delegation.
- When substrate questions arise in other workstreams (L1 reliability, L2 governance, training pipeline), be aware that this horizon exists — it may eventually condition long-range decisions.
- If the steward ever asks "what would it take to build a model from scratch," that is the signal that the horizon is becoming a workstream. Until then, marker only.

## Reference

- Greenblatt article: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WewsByywWNhX9rtwi/current-ais-seem-pretty-misaligned-to-me
- Related: `~/CLAUDE.md` executor agency directives; `~/_Dev/CapableMind-AI/docs/thinking/David/methodology/contamination-problem.md`