The Second AI Executive Order: State and Local Security and Artificial Intelligence in the 21st Century, Report of a High-Precision Summit

The draft rules were released by the White House Office of Management and Budget two days after President Biden signed an executive order that amounted to a government-wide plan to simultaneously increase government use of AI while also seeking to prevent harm from the technology. The need to keep people safe from Artificial intelligence was the main theme of the order.

“If the benefits do not meaningfully outweigh the risks, agencies should not use the AI,” the memo says. If the draft memo is approved, the models that deal with national security and allow agencies to effectively issue themselves waivers, will be exempt.

The draft memo would require testing and evaluation of algorithms to be done by people with no direct involvement in a system’s development and encourage external “red teaming” tests of generative AI models. It also instructs the leaders of federal agencies to explore ways they can use generative AI such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT “without imposing undue risk.”

Biden’s AI executive order requires the OMB to provide its guidance to federal agencies in the next five months. The public is being invited to comment on the draft policy until December 5.

The leading Artificial Intelligence experts were in London this week for the summit. Yoshua Bengio, who was a pioneer of deep learning and leads the center for research on foundation models, was one of the people I met. He thinks we have a limited amount of time to make sure that the results of Artificial Intelligence are in our best interests.

The venue for the Summit paid homage to Alan Turing, the British mathematician who did foundational work on both computing and AI, and who helped the Allies break Nazi codes during the Second World War by developing early computing devices. (A previous UK government apologized in 2009 for the way Turing was prosecuted for being gay in 1952.)

“When a senior is kicked off his healthcare plan because of a faulty AI algorithm, is that not existential for him?” Harris said. A woman is threatened with an abusive partner with explicit photographs and is that not a serious threat?