Center for AI Safety

AI safety research center
Center for AI Safety
Formation2022
HeadquartersSan Francisco, California
Director
Dan Hendrycks
Websitehttps://www.safe.ai/

The Center for AI Safety (CAIS) is a nonprofit organization based in San Francisco, that promotes the safe development and deployment of artificial intelligence (AI). CAIS's work encompasses research in technical AI safety and AI ethics, advocacy, and support to grow the AI safety research field.[1][2]

In May 2023, CAIS published a statement on AI risk of extinction signed by hundreds of professors of AI, leaders of major AI companies, and other public figures.[3][4][5][6][7]

Research

CAIS researchers published "An Overview of Catastrophic AI Risks", which details risk scenarios and risk mitigation strategies. Risks described include the use of AI in autonomous warfare or for engineering pandemics, as well as AI capabilities for deception and hacking.[8][9] Another work, conducted in collaboration with researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, described an automated way to discover adversarial attacks of large language models that bypass safety measures, highlighting the inadequacy of current safety systems.[10][11]

Activities

Other initiatives include a compute cluster to support AI safety research, an online course titled "Intro to ML Safety", and a fellowship for philosophy professors to address conceptual problems.[9]

See also

References

  1. ^ "AI poses risk of extinction, tech leaders warn in open letter. Here's why alarm is spreading". USA TODAY. 31 May 2023.
  2. ^ "Our Mission | CAIS". www.safe.ai. Retrieved 2023-04-13.
  3. ^ Center for AI Safety's Hendrycks on AI Risks, Bloomberg Technology, 31 May 2023
  4. ^ Roose, Kevin (2023-05-30). "A.I. Poses 'Risk of Extinction,' Industry Leaders Warn". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2023-06-03.
  5. ^ "Artificial intelligence warning over human extinction – all you need to know". The Independent. 2023-05-31. Retrieved 2023-06-03.
  6. ^ Lomas, Natasha (2023-05-30). "OpenAI's Altman and other AI giants back warning of advanced AI as 'extinction' risk". TechCrunch. Retrieved 2023-06-03.
  7. ^ Castleman, Terry (2023-05-31). "Prominent AI leaders warn of 'risk of extinction' from new technology". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 2023-06-03.
  8. ^ Hendrycks, Dan; Mazeika, Mantas; Woodside, Thomas (2023). "An Overview of Catastrophic AI Risks". arXiv:2306.12001 [cs.CY].
  9. ^ a b Scharfenberg, David (July 6, 2023). "Dan Hendrycks from the Center for AI Safety hopes he can prevent a catastrophe". The Boston Globe. Retrieved 2023-07-09.
  10. ^ Metz, Cade (2023-07-27). "Researchers Poke Holes in Safety Controls of ChatGPT and Other Chatbots". The New York Times. Retrieved 2023-07-27.
  11. ^ "Universal and Transferable Attacks on Aligned Language Models". llm-attacks.org. Retrieved 2023-07-27.