OpenAI, Anthropic and Google are working to create an AI standards body
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OpenAI, Anthropic and Google are exploring a self-regulatory body modelled on US financial regulator that oversees brokers and investment firms.
PHOTO: AFP
NEW YORK – The world’s biggest AI companies are working on creating a standards body, ChatGPT-maker OpenAI said on Sept 15, as fears rise about the dangers of AI and pressure is on to create a safer version of the technology.
OpenAI said it was working with Anthropic and Google on an idea that originated from a proposal by Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis for a self-regulatory body modelled after the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority that oversees US brokers and investment firms.
In July, Hassabis called for the United States to create an organisation that would test the most powerful AI systems before they are released to the public.
“Funding would need to be substantial and likely mostly come from industry, in order to attract world-class technical talent and provide the necessary compute resources for large-scale testing,” Hassabis wrote.
OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman on Sept 15 voiced support for industry-wide collaboration and acknowledged the public’s fear that competition between companies and countries might sideline safety.
“I think it’s great for our industry to say we want to come together and we want to be able to coordinate and make sure we have enough time to do this safely,” Altman said at a conference hosted by Salesforce in San Francisco.
“When there’s any implication...” that some in the industry might “not do the right thing, I think that’s when people get very scared”, he added.
Some tech figures fear cooperation among the AI giants will push out smaller rivals.
The chief of Canadian AI company Cohere recently accused the dominant American AI labs of forming a “cartel” under the guise of safety.
“AI needs guardrails. That is not the dispute and never has been. The dispute is over who writes them, who gets to participate and whose interests the rules are protecting,” Cohere co-founder and CEO Aiden Gomez wrote in a blog post on Sept 13.
Concerns about AI safety have escalated in recent weeks, including warnings from two workers who resigned from major AI developers amid concerns about the industry’s risks.
Last week, researcher Jacob Coxon left Anthropic and warned that AI companies were “gambling with our lives”. He also previously worked at OpenAI.
On Sept 14, former Google DeepMind researcher Bilal Chughtai echoed the concerns raised by Coxon and others. “I earnestly believe that AI has the potential to kill us all, and that we might be running out of time to avoid this outcome,” Chughtai wrote on social media.
On Sept 12, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called for a slowdown in the pace of AI development, a sentiment that Altman, Elon Musk and Hassabis all supported.
US Senator Bernie Sanders, who fears catastrophic consequences of AI, said that tech leaders could not be trusted to honour pledges to slow down development or set safety standards.
“When the future of humanity is at stake, we need binding international safety rules, not voluntary standards from the industry,” Sanders said at an AI safety event in Washington.
Altman warned that AI accidents, small and large, might be inevitable.
“Accidents with any new technology are unavoidable, and we should have a great culture of transparent reporting about them,” Altman said.
“Learning from them quickly and adapting as they happen, I think, will serve our industry well, and maybe we can avoid” the bigger, potentially catastrophic incidents, he added.
US President Donald Trump on Sept 14 dismissed warnings about the risks of AI as “hoaxes”.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has also pushed back, signalling a belief that the warnings on AI were part of a coordinated campaign.
“The confluence of these words and then the prediction is alarming and troubling and it shouldn’t be done. It’s irresponsible,” Huang said Sept 14 at a conference in Los Angeles where Trump called him while he was on stage.
Huang, in the call, thanked Trump for “seeing through” the warnings on AI.
Nvidia sits at the centre of the AI revolution, with its chips powering the vast majority of the systems, and Huang has become an informal adviser to Trump. AFP