Helpful post on the upcoming red-teaming event, thanks for putting it together!
Minor quibble—“That does mean I’m left with the slightly odd conclusion that all that’s happened is the Whitehouse has endorsed a community red-teaming event at a conference.”
I mean they did also announce $140m, that’s pretty good! That’s to say, the two other announcements seem pretty promising.
The funding through the NSF to launch 7 new National AI Research Institutes is promising, especially the goal for these to provide public goods such as reseach into climate, agriculture, energy, public health, education, and cybersecurity. $140m is, for example, more than the UK’s Foundation Models Taskforce £100m ($126m).
The final announcement was that in summer 2023 the OMB will be releasing draft policy guidance for the use of AI systems by the US government. This sounds excruciatinly boring, but will be important, as the federal government is such a bigger buyer/procurer and setter of standards. In the past, this guidance has been “you have to follow NIST standards”, which gives those standards a big carrot. The EU AI Act is more stick, but much of the high-risk AI it focusses on is use by governments (education, health, recruitment, police, welfare etc) and they’re developing standards too. So far amount of commonality across the two. To make another invidious UK comparison, the AI white paper says that a year from now, they’ll put out a report considering the need for statutory interventions. So we’ve got neither stick, carrot or standards...
Thanks for highlighting that there were other 2 announcements that I didn’t focus on in this post.
Whilst the funding announcement may be positive, I didn’t expect that it would have strong implications for alignment research—so I chose to ignore it in this post. I didn’t spend more than a minute checking my assumption there, though.
RE the announcement of further OMB policies- I totally agree that it sounds like it could be important for alignment / risk reduction. I omitted that announcement mostly because I didn’t have very much context to know what those policies would entail, given the announcement was quite light on details at this point. Thanks for shedding some light on what it could mean!
Helpful post on the upcoming red-teaming event, thanks for putting it together!
Minor quibble—“That does mean I’m left with the slightly odd conclusion that all that’s happened is the Whitehouse has endorsed a community red-teaming event at a conference.”
I mean they did also announce $140m, that’s pretty good! That’s to say, the two other announcements seem pretty promising.
The funding through the NSF to launch 7 new National AI Research Institutes is promising, especially the goal for these to provide public goods such as reseach into climate, agriculture, energy, public health, education, and cybersecurity. $140m is, for example, more than the UK’s Foundation Models Taskforce £100m ($126m).
The final announcement was that in summer 2023 the OMB will be releasing draft policy guidance for the use of AI systems by the US government. This sounds excruciatinly boring, but will be important, as the federal government is such a bigger buyer/procurer and setter of standards. In the past, this guidance has been “you have to follow NIST standards”, which gives those standards a big carrot. The EU AI Act is more stick, but much of the high-risk AI it focusses on is use by governments (education, health, recruitment, police, welfare etc) and they’re developing standards too. So far amount of commonality across the two. To make another invidious UK comparison, the AI white paper says that a year from now, they’ll put out a report considering the need for statutory interventions. So we’ve got neither stick, carrot or standards...
Thanks for highlighting that there were other 2 announcements that I didn’t focus on in this post.
Whilst the funding announcement may be positive, I didn’t expect that it would have strong implications for alignment research—so I chose to ignore it in this post. I didn’t spend more than a minute checking my assumption there, though.
RE the announcement of further OMB policies- I totally agree that it sounds like it could be important for alignment / risk reduction. I omitted that announcement mostly because I didn’t have very much context to know what those policies would entail, given the announcement was quite light on details at this point. Thanks for shedding some light on what it could mean!