What Demis Hassabis Proposed
Demis Hassabis proposed that a Standards Body modeled on FINRA, an industry regulatory Body that is a self regulatory organization for the financial sector, be set up to review the latest frontier models before they are publicly launched:
“The rapid progress we’re seeing in AI requires a new approach to testing frontier AI model capabilities that is dynamic, adaptable, and rigorous. The US is well positioned, given its economic and technical standing, to take the first step in developing such a framework. It could establish a new Standards Body modelled on a federally overseen public-private partnership or self-regulatory organisation, much like the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), with a board that includes independent leading technical experts and open-source representatives. Funding would need to be substantial and likely mostly come from industry, in order to attract world-class technical talent and provide the necessary compute resources for large-scale testing.”
Hassabis’s post has already 8 million views and received rave reviews by many in AI sector:
What Mark Thomas Proposed
This proposal sounds like the same idea as proposed by Mark Thomas at Lawfare in an article titled “AI Companies Can’t Regulate Themselves. They Should Regulate Each Other.” Thomas wrote:
“The solution to this problem does not require inventing a new institutional form. For nearly a century, financial regulators have deployed and refined a model called federally supervised self-regulatory organizations, or SROs. Through SROs such as FINRA (the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority), industries govern themselves through binding rules subject to government approval and modification. The infrastructure for this already partially exists. Every major frontier lab except Elon Musk’s xAI belongs to the Frontier Model Forum, a body that, among other activities, coordinates risk management among members. What it lacks is statutory authority, mandatory membership, and government oversight—the features that distinguish an SRO from voluntary self-regulation.”
A Good Idea
Putting aside who should get credit for proposing this idea, I believe it is a sensible approach to address the rapid development of ever more powerful AI models that could wreak havoc on the global economy and a host of sectors, including defense, cybersecurity, electricity and energy, and financial markets, by exposing vulnerabilities in the software that runs those areas.
Responses from AI executives were favorable:
