How did the government decide OpenAI's frontier model was safe to release?
"Exactly what that dialog looked like between the government and Anthropic and OpenAI is unclear. " OpenAI is rolling out its latest advanced LLM, Sol, for wide public access. Sol is considered to be at least on par with Anthropic's Fable, a model whose capabilities (or ownership) stressed out the White House enough that it was briefly banned from public access.
Key Takeaways
- So how did these models get the OK for release?
- Andy Konwinski, a computer scientist who co-founded Databricks, Perplexity, and the Laude Institute, said he's never spoken to anyone who understands the process, even employees at frontier labs.
- "There will not be an FDA for AI," Sriram Krishnan, a former Andreessen Horowitz partner who served as a senior advisor for AI in the White House until last month, told Financial Times.
Notably, there's still no agreement on what kinds of models require government scrutiny, or what agency or agencies should perform those evaluations.
- national cyber director Sean Cairncross, but it's not clear who the experts that tested the models were or how they did that.
OpenAI declined to share details on the government's process with TechCrunch, but pointed to the results of several external evaluations by organizations like U.
- It's hard for outside observers to separate those activities from the government's apparently lighter-touch approach to regulating Sol.
So how did these models get the OK for release? Short answer: Nobody's quite sure. "Frankly, I don't have visibility into those exact processes, so yes, I don't feel like I have enough information to say whether they're adequate or not," Mina Narayanan, a senior research analyst at Georgetown's Center for Security and Emerging Technology, told TechCrunch.
"Anthropic did say that they were in conversations with the government, and that they developed a classifier to detect jailbreak attempts, and they've implemented defensive gap strategies to prevent future jailbreaks, but exactly what that dialog looked like between the government and Anthropic and OpenAI is unclear. Ball, a former Trump policy advisor who now works for OpenAI, wrote that "nobody knows what the requirements are to get licensed" in his newsletter last month. Andy Konwinski, a computer scientist who co-founded Databricks, Perplexity, and the Laude Institute, said he's never spoken to anyone who understands the process, even employees at frontier labs.
"It's existentially a problem," he tells TechCrunch. "Safety or not, it's about who has the power to make decisions - who gatekeeps and decides on permissions? " Eighteen months into the Trump administration, there is still little clarity about how to move forward, despite - or, some critics allege, because - of the industry figures setting policy.
For more details please read the original article at TechCrunch AI.
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