AI Safety Institute

The UK-US agreement on AI safety is a significant moment for the AI Safety Institute and for the development of global safety standards on AI.  Here’s what it involves: The US and UK AI Safety Institutes will jointly test advanced AI models. We will also share research insights, share model access, and enable expert secondments between the Institutes. This will allow us to develop a shared framework for testing advanced AI and international best practices for other countries to follow. By working together, the UK and US can minimise the risks of AI and harness its potential to help everyone live happier, healthier and more productive lives. Find out more: https://lnkd.in/eX4bsy6G

We are announcing new grants for research into systemic AI safety.   Initially backed by up to £8.5 million, this programme will fund researchers to advance the science underpinning AI safety.   The world needs to think carefully about how to adapt our infrastructure and systems for a new world in which AI is embedded in everything we do. This programme is designed to generate a huge body of ideas for how to tackle this problem, and to help make sure great ideas can be put into practice. Read more: https://lnkd.in/eHHiFCbG

We're opening an office in San Francisco! This will enable us to hire more top talent, collaborate closely with the US AI Safety Institute, and engage even more with the wider AI research community. In London, we have built a leading research team in government, attracting senior alumni from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Oxford. We're excited to keep building this team globally now and to drive international coordination around AI safety. Find out more: https://lnkd.in/eButCCAi

We have published our latest progress report.    Read more below on our fast-paced work delivering on our mission to evaluate AI models and advance the science on AI risk.    https://lnkd.in/giphDpGe

This has been a superb week for investment in the UK – a huge vote of confidence in our plan. Today CoreWeave – a US AI start up valued at $19 billion – announced a $1 billion investment in data centres in the UK. On Tuesday the biggest investment in a UK AI start-up in history was announced. Over $1 billion into autonomous vehicle start-up Wayve.  On top of that CoreWeave is also establishing its European headquarters in London. And earlier this week top US company Scale AI announced it was doing the same.   They are not the only ones. Microsoft recently announced their AI hub in London. OpenAI, Anthropic, Palantir and Cohere have all chosen to locate their European headquarters here.  We will keep building on this success. This Government is unashamedly optimistic about the power of technology.   The UK is at the cutting edge of applying AI to drive exciting scientific advances.  Work is already underway on an AI model that looks at a single picture of your eyes to predict heart disease, strokes or Parkinson's. When the pioneers say AI could cure cancer, we believe them. Too often regulation can stifle those innovators. We cannot let that happen. Not with potentially the most transformative technology of our time. That’s why we don’t support calls for a blanket ban or pause in AI.   It’s why we are not legislating. It’s also why we are pro-open source.   Open source drives innovation.   It creates start-ups. It creates communities. There must be a very high bar for any restrictions on open source.  But that doesn’t mean we are blind to risks.   We are building the capability to empirically assess the most powerful AI models.   Our groundbreaking AI Safety Institute is attracting top talent from the best AI companies and universities in the world.  While talent is the key ingredient for an AI ecosystem, access to powerful computers necessary to train and experiment with AI is a close second.  That’s why we’re investing £1.5bn into compute.   Our first cluster of 5,000 of Nvidia’s latest AI superchips will go live this summer in Bristol, alongside the new Dawn computer in Cambridge.   We will soon set out how start-ups and academia will access these powerful new supercomputers. All of this progress is part of our plan to grow the economy. The sector is already worth more than £3.7 billion every year and employs over 50,000 people.    We know open source is a recipe for innovation.     That’s why the AI Safety Institute is today open sourcing what it has built.    The code for its Inspect project – a framework for building AI safety evaluations – is now available to anyone to use.   The AI Safety institute will also soon announce plans for an Open Source Open Day bringing together experts to explore how open source tools can improve safety.    This government’s approach is pro innovation, pro AI, pro open source and pro empiricism.   And it’s working.

We open-sourced Inspect, our framework for large language model evaluations: https://lnkd.in/eZgtjHe8. Inspect enables researchers to easily create simple benchmark-style evaluations, scale up to more sophisticated evaluations, and build interactive workflows.   Sharing Inspect through open source means our approach to AI safety evaluations is now available to anyone to use and improve, leading to high-quality evaluations across the board and boosting collaboration on AI safety testing. We're excited to see the research community use and build upon this work!

1 year ago today, we started out as the Foundation Model Taskforce with £100m investment from the UK government.   Today, we're the AI Safety Institute.   In the last year, we've built our team, evaluated new models and enhanced global AI safety.

The legacy of Bletchley Park will continue with two days of talks in May at the AI Seoul Summit.   AI safety is a shared global challenge, and these continued discussions will ensure we can deliver a safe, responsible approach to AI development.

We’re moving full steam ahead for the next leg of talks on safe AI development, as we prepare for the AI Seoul Summit in May. The UK kickstarted the global conversation on AI safety in November with the generational Bletchley Park summit, and next month’s discussions will look to build on the historic agreements we reached. More here 👇🏻 https://lnkd.in/eKTjcUV4

The UK & US are paving the way for a future where we can safely harness the benefits of AI. This agreement, made last week, will see the UK’s AI Safety Institute join forces with the US AI Safety Institute to address the defining technology challenge of our generation. U.S. Department of Commerce