Spooked by Mythos, Trump suddenly realized AI safety testing might be good

Without defining standards, “the process can be politicized,” Kreps said. That risks creating a system where “whoever holds power gets to shape how the vetting works.” So far, neither the Biden nor the Trump administrations has figured out how to avoid that, Kreps said. Fears of government controlling AI outputs Microsoft’s blog said that “CAISI, Microsoft and NIST will collaborate on improving methodologies for adversarial assessments,” which suggests that the plan is to develop these standards on the fly. According to Microsoft, “testing AI systems in ways that probe unexpected behaviors, misuse pathways, and failure modes” is “much like stress-testing whether airbags, seatbelts, and braking systems work effectively and reliably in safety-critical driving scenarios.” But Gregory Falco, a Cornell University assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and expert in tracking governance of AI , insists that there’s a better way. “Government oversight of AI cannot simply mean political review of model outputs, nor should it become a mechanism for deciding whether a model says favorable or unfavorable things about a president or administration,” Falco said. Rather than relying on a politicized government leveraging evaluations to control the AI systems that the public uses, the US could build “some form of independent audit,” Falco said. …