Latest Reads on the AI Emergency, curated by Gerd
Microsoft AI
Humanist AI in practice: A public consultation on our Code of Conduct for MAI Models | Microsoft AI
We’re a lean, fast-moving lab made up of some of the world’s most talented minds. We have an exciting roadmap of compute at MAI, which is ramping quickly and extensively. And we have an ambitious mission we truly believe in. We’re also fortunate to partner with incredible product teams giving our models the chance to reach billions of users and create immense positive impact. If you’re a brilliant, highly-ambitious and low ego individual, you’ll fit right in—come and join us as we work on our ne
"But while AI companies do indeed need more breathing space to consider the full impact of their inventions before releasing them to the market, self-interested oversight is not the kind of governance we need" (read below)
AI distrust, explained (via Axios)
"Here are the key factors shaping that distrust, which are poised to delay the kind of "all-hands-on-deck" response many want.
💰 Money: Anthropic stands alone in the history of capitalism, a company whose leaders are so concerned with safety that it broke away from OpenAI. Its employees, up to the CEO, honestly believe its product is so dangerous that there's a chance it could destroy humanity.
- And yet, as soon as this week, it's expected to file for what many think will be the biggest IPO of all time, seeking to raise $100 billion at a $2 trillion valuation.
- Picture Oppenheimer meeting with sell-side analysts and you get a window into the "Dr. Strangelove" of it all. That duality — dire warnings and fundraising based on promises of AI Valhalla — continues to sow confusion.
⚠️ Safety: A group of AI obsessives and technologists for years have spent vast sums financing research and organizations dedicated to AI safety. The problem is that many critics see some of that work as lacking in substance, too focused on the probability of end-of-the-world scenarios.
- Another issue is how closely aligned some safety research organizations are to frontier AI labs.
- Anthropic has pointed to METR, which conducted the evaluation of the Hugging Face incident at OpenAI, as a possible third-party evaluator. But industry skeptics point to a laundry list of financial and personal ties between the two companies as a nonstarter for competitors.
- To the extent top U.S. AI companies embrace self-regulation, finding third-party organizations that are viewed as truly independent will be a challenge.
📊 Business: Business leaders, including Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, have embraced open-weight AI systems, which are generally cheaper and offer companies the chance to build and customize proprietary models with their own data.
- Most of the best open models were made by Chinese startups, and some U.S. companies are using them to save money and protect themselves from potential competition from frontier AI companies.
- Any attempt to bring AI systems under control could lead to a ban or restrictions on usage of Chinese models, something that might cause many U.S. businesses to revolt.
🏛️ Politics: Top administration officials, including White House AI adviser David Sacks, have repeatedly dismissed the push for regulation and oversight as a classic attempt at "regulatory capture."
