"Design for intended outcomes not just capability Hashimoto argues that building ever-more-capable AI without directing it toward specific human values is a mistake, because 'profit incentives are not necessarily aligned with what humanity at large should aspire to achieve.' He proposes a concrete reframe: 'If we care about democracy, we then need to work on designing AI that can make humans more democratic' rather than optimizing purely for engagement. The practical version for any builder, manager, or policymaker: before optimizing a system for performance, explicitly specify the human outcome you want it to produce — because a system optimized for the wrong metric will reliably deliver the wrong result. Source: Tatsunori Hashimoto, The Cognitive Revolution (or similar Stanford AI podcast), Small Language Models and AI Democratization"