Meaning Alignment Institute

The Meaning Alignment Institute (MAI) is a nonprofit research organization founded in 2023 that works to align AI systems, markets, and democratic institutions with what people genuinely value. Co-founded by Joe Edelman, Ellie Hain, and Oliver Klingefjord, the institute emerged from earlier work under the name Rebuilding Meaning and was catalyzed by an OpenAI Democratic Inputs to AI grant in 2023. Joe Edelman, the institute's director and principal investigator, brings a distinctive background that bridges philosophy, technology, and social design. He studied under Alan Kay and Marvin Minsky at MIT, developed meaning-based organizational metrics at Couchsurfing, and co-founded the Center for Humane Technology with Tristan Harris, where he coined the term Time Well Spent. Oliver Klingefjord serves as technical lead and previously founded startups in France and worked on AI-assisted deliberation at the AI Objectives Institute. Ellie Hain leads partnerships and strategy, focusing on meaning-centric social narratives and institutional transformation. Ryan Lowe, formerly co-lead for GPT-4 alignment at OpenAI, serves as Research Ecosystem Lead. The institute's flagship contribution is Democratic Fine-Tuning (DFT), an alternative to Constitutional AI that gathers moral information from diverse populations to shape language model behavior. Their process involves a Values Elicitation Chatbot that interviews people to create Values Cards from meaningful stories, followed by a collective process where participants build Moral Graphs mapping which values are considered wisest for guiding AI behavior. A proof-of-concept study with 500 representative Americans demonstrated that people across demographic and political divides could identify shared underlying values on controversial topics. In July 2025, the institute launched Full-Stack Alignment as a broader research program, arguing that alignment must address not just AI systems but the entire stack of institutions from individual values through recommender systems, companies, and oversight bodies. Their concept of Thick Models of Value (TMV) provides structured representations that distinguish enduring values from fleeting preferences, addictions, or political slogans. The Meaning Economy Research Consortium (MERC) explores how AI-augmented economic mechanisms might replace attention-based economies with meaning-focused alternatives. The institute operates with a small core team of approximately three to four full-time staff, supplemented by a collaborative research network of 30+ experts across academia and industry. They maintain presences in both Berlin, Germany and San Francisco, California. The organization is fiscally sponsored by The Hack Foundation (Hack Club) and has been supported by OpenAI, the Survival and Flourishing Fund, and ARIA (the UK Advanced Research and Invention Agency).