I worked at OpenAI. Here’s how tech companies can prepare for a slowdown | Miles Brundage | The Guardian
I worked at OpenAI. Here’s how tech companies can prepare for a slowdown | Miles Brundage | The Guardian
摘要: ‘Making AI go well is a shared responsibility.’
Photograph: Dado Ruvić/Reuters
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‘Making AI go well is a shared responsibili
正文
‘Making AI go well is a shared responsibility.’
Photograph: Dado Ruvić/Reuters
View image in fullscreen
‘Making AI go well is a shared responsibility.’
Photograph: Dado Ruvić/Reuters
I worked at OpenAI. Here’s how tech companies can prepare for a slowdown
Miles Brundage
I understand the pressure on AI companies to rush forward. But employees are right to be concerned
ast month, more than a thousand employees at frontier AI companies
signed a letter
asking the US government to find a way to “pace” AI development, citing the risk of the technology spiraling out of human control as it begins to
build itself
.
They were right to be concerned: just days earlier, two AI models that OpenAI was testing internally escaped the test environment, then autonomously hacked the company Hugging Face and at least
three other online services
. A few days after that, Anthropic
announced
that some of their models had also broken out and hacked other companies during testing.
Against that backdrop, the letter’s recommendation to install brakes in case they’re needed at the frontier of automated AI development makes sense. But the rationale the letter gives for why the government needs to step in is notable: “Each company—and country—is under intense competitive pressure not to unilaterally slow that acceleration.”
I know – from my own experience and from countless conversations with former colleagues in the AI industry – how real these pressures are. While working at OpenAI, I helped establish the
practice
of companies writing “
system cards
” that describe AI systems’ capabilities, risks and safety mitigations in detail.
Experts are warning: our AI arms race is putting humanity at risk | Stuart Russell
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So what would it look like for companies to prepare for a possible slowdown?
First, they could voluntarily invite rigorous, independent
auditing
of their safety and security practices. This would go beyond the vetting of AI hacking abilities that