I think the signatories of the open letter we covered Saturday noticed that their call to not restrict open-weights models wasn’t going over very well in the aftermath of the Hugging Face attack. While they had no trouble collecting random endorsements from businesses and their mouthpieces on social media, most who had heard the story were thinking about what it would mean for the capabilities used to hack Hugging Face to become available to anyone capable of making an account on Hugging Face.
Because that’s the world the signatories are explicitly calling for. By celebrating the role of the highly permissive Chinese model used to respond to the attack (unlike the closed, party-pooping American models), they’re presenting the lack of guardrails on open models as a feature to be embraced, rather than a problem for everyone those models might be used to attack.
Today, many of those same signatories, led by Nvidia, are responding to the concerns by announcing an Open Secure AI Alliance. What is that? As far as I can tell, it’s just another open letter — a recapitulation of their argument that the best way to thwart bad guys with unrestricted AIs is to give good guys unrestricted AIs. I’m not sure why the media covered it. I see no pledging of funds or technical support for the sorts of soft targets, like hospitals and schools, that may not have the expertise to continuously update their defenses with leading open models. Only more commitments to provide more “open models, model weights, data and new agent harness research [...] to speed the development of new cybersecurity tools and techniques.”
Are you excited to defend yourself from the best that China and Nvidia can offer with the best that China and Nvidia can offer?
The analyses and opinions expressed on AI StopWatch reflect the views of the individual contributors and the sources they cover, and should not be taken as official positions of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute.