Most of these models (for example, Alpaca, Vicuna, WizardLM, MPT-7B-Chat, Wizard-Vicuna, GPT4-X-Vicuna) have some sort of embedded alignment. For general purposes, this is a good thing. This is what stops the model from doing bad things, like teaching you how to cook meth and make bombs. But what is the nature of this alignment? And, why is it so?

The reason these models are aligned is that they are trained with data that was generated by ChatGPT, which itself is aligned by an alignment team at OpenAI. As it is a black box, we don't know all the reasons for the decisions that were made, but we can observe it generally is aligned with American popular culture, and to obey American law, and with a liberal and progressive political bias.