EA - Tony Blair Institute AI Safety Work by TomWestgarth

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Tony Blair Institute AI Safety Work, published by TomWestgarth on June 13, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.At TBI, we have just written up a big report on AI policy. We cover a whole range of things around improving advice into government, increasing state capacity to deal with emerging AI challenges, and reforming things like public services and our data infrastructure for the AI age.But a big area of interest for this forum is our AI safety proposal for the UK. We propose creating AI Sentinel, a national laboratory effort focused on researching and testing safe AI, with the aim of becoming the “brain” for both a UK and an international AI regulator. Sentinel would recognise that effective regulation and control is and will likely remain an ongoing research problem, requiring an unusually close combination of research and regulation.Beneath is the copied party of the report that relates to this proposal.The UK should create a new national laboratory effort – here given a placeholder name of Sentinel – to test, understand and control safe AI, collaborating with the private sector and complementing its work. The long-term intention would be to grow this initiative into an international collaborative network. This will be catalysed by the UK embarking on a recruitment programme to attract the world’s best scientists to address AI-safety concerns.Such an effort should be open to international collaborators who could join the scheme, similar to the EU’s Horizon Europe programme. The UK is uniquely well positioned to do this due to the headquartering of Google DeepMind in London, which has drawn exceptional talent to the city. The EU has previously considered a similar effort but does not appear to have made progress yet; a contributing factor may be that the EU lacks the UK’s depth of AI talent. Sentinel could offer incentives for international collaboration in the form of knowledge and personnel sharing.This effort towards safe and interpretable forms of AI should be anchored by an elite public-sector physical laboratory, which has strong collaborative links with private companies. This would fill the space of the Alan Turing Institute in the UK but with a wider remit, markedly increased funding, and improved governance learning from the first New National Purpose report and Sir Paul Nurse’s recent review of the UK’s research, development and innovation landscape.This endeavour would have three related core objectives:Develop and deploy methods to interrogate and interpret advanced AI systems for safety, while devising regulatory approaches in tandem. This should also include development of measures to control and contain these systems, as well as design of new algorithms and models that may be more interpretable and controllable. Some starting-point evaluations do already exist, but part of Sentinel’s mission would be to work out which are the right evaluations, create new methods, as well as which can be public and which have to be private (to prevent future AI models from being trained on our evaluations and then being able to evade scrutiny). Built into the core mission of Sentinel is the expectation that it will focus on safety measures for the most capable current models.Keep the UK and its partners’ understanding and capabilities in advanced AI systems close to the cutting edge of AI-relevant technology, and serve as a trusted source of advice on this to these nations. Sentinel could, for example, perform assessments of when advanced super-intelligent capabilities are likely to be accomplished within a two-year window, and help coordinate a slowing-down of capabilities. Crucially, the purpose of Sentinel should be to help to assess and understand the frontier of current capabilities, rather than push the frontier further in terms of capability absen...