In a quandary of regulatory oversight, the deployment of OpenAI’s latest advanced large language model, Sol, has exposed a staggering lack of transparency regarding how the United States government evaluates frontier artificial intelligence for public release.
The precipice of AI Governance
As OpenAI rolls out Sol for wide public access—a model considered to be at least on par with Anthropic’s briefly banned Fable—the concomitant question of safety verification remains shrouded in secrecy. Mina Narayanan, a senior research analyst at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, explicitly noted her lack of visibility into the exact processes, stating she does not feel she has enough information to deem them adequate. You can read the full investigative breakdown on TechCrunch.
"It’s existentially a problem. Safety or not, it’s about who has the power to make decisions — who gatekeeps and decides on permissions?" — Andy Konwinski, Computer Scientist and Co-founder of Databricks and Perplexity
An implicit Regulatory burden
Eighteen months into the current administration, a metamorphosis in policy remains incomplete. While an executive order recently laid out a roadmap for evaluating frontier models, the specifics are yet to be filled. Sriram Krishnan, a former senior advisor for AI in the White House, definitively stated that "there will not be an FDA for AI." Currently, the Department of Commerce’s Center for AI Standards and Innovation appears to be taking the lead, yet there is still no consensus on which models require scrutiny or which agencies should perform the evaluations.
The amelioration of Future Oversight
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman indicated that the process involved high-level conversations with cabinet officials, pointing to external evaluations by organizations like the U.K. AISI and SecureBio. However, critics like David Siegel, founder of the quantitative hedge fund Two Sigma, warn of a deleterious future where a small number of firms control the technology while the government evaluates it in "secretive laboratories," leaving the scientific community without access. To ameliorate this conundrum, experts argue for a transition toward third-party auditing organizations licensed by the government, ensuring that true safety and alignment researchers play a pivotal role in the gatekeeping of tomorrow's most powerful emerging technologies.