Very nice research. The strangest detail to me is that alignment and test performance appear to be slightly negatively correlated: Better alignment can indeed be attained through pre-training, but at a cost of degraded performance of about 4% on average. This strikes me as surprising as there is no immediately obvious reason why training for alignment ought to result in degraded capability to solve technical problems -- unless. What if the issue is precisely that? Alignment roughly aims to make LLMs follow human instructions. But if humans are dumb and computers still have to obey them, maybe the result is degraded logical reasoning? Really interesting result either way but the negative correlation is the most fascinating detail to me.