How Big Tech is co-opting the rising stars of artificial intelligence
“To build AI at any kind of meaningful scale, any developer is going to have core dependencies on resources that are largely concentrated in only a few firms,” said Sarah Myers West, managing director at the AI Now Institute, which researches the effects of AI on society. “There really isn’t a path out of it.”
The Washington Post
Sep 30, 2023
Amazon’s Partnership With Anthropic Shows Size Matters in the AI Industry
Vipra says that Anthropic, which prides itself on being particularly safety-conscious, will struggle to avoid being influenced by Amazon. “The announcement says it's all about safety—it's pitched as expanding access to safe AI products," she says. "But it really shows that productization has taken over.”
Time
Sep 25, 2023
Tech CEOs Met With Congress To Discuss The Future Of AI Regulation
Sarah Myers West and Brian Ray join AirTalk host Larry Mantle to talk about the future of AI policy.
KPCC
Sep 15, 2023
Musk, Zuckerberg Lead Parade of Tech Titans to Senate AI Event
“There’s been quite a lot of skepticism around whose views are represented and whether the concerns of the public are adequately represented here,” said Sarah Myers West, managing director of the AI Now Institute, a policy research group.
Bloomberg Law
Sep 12, 2023
The Deceptive Fantasy Behind LLaMA-2 and Other Open-Source AI
Sarah Myers West explains why AI programs don't come close to truly being open.
The Messenger
Aug 25, 2023
AI-enhanced identification: A danger in the Middle East?
The AI Now Institute wants a complete ban on remote biometric identification, Kak added. "Nothing else makes sense," she told DW, adding that privacy laws and other rules won't help. "And not just in the Middle East, but here in the US and in Europe too. The problems with these systems aren't magically fixed in Western liberal democracies — even though the dystopia of what can go wrong is often immediately palpable under authoritarian regimes."
DW
Aug 23, 2023
The ugly truth about ‘open’ A.I. models championed by Meta, Google, and other Big Tech players
In a paper published this past week, researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and the AI Now Institute, along with Signal Foundation President Meredith Whittaker, dove deep into what exactly is—and is not—open about current “open” A.I. systems.
Fortune
Aug 22, 2023
What normal Americans — not AI companies — want for AI
To Sarah Myers West, managing director for the research center AI Now Institute, this public distrust is both appropriate and unsurprising. “I think people have learned from the past decade of tech-enabled crises,” she told me. “It’s quite clear when you look at the evidence that self-regulatory approaches don’t work.”
Vox
Aug 18, 2023
AI regulation is taking shape, but startups are being left out
AI Now sounded the alarm on Big AI’s influence with a report it released in April. The organization warned that companies led the narrative around AI, overstating the importance of the technology to the future and influencing how people think about it. AI Now believes the conversation should be led by regulators and the public.
The Verge
Aug 8, 2023
The AI Crackdown Is Coming
Aware that blind trust in the benevolence of Big Tech is not an option, West and her team at the AI Now Institute this month published a new framework called “Zero Trust AI Governance.” It’s exactly what it sounds like — a call for lawmakers to take matters into their own hands.
The Atlantic
Aug 7, 2023
America Already Has an AI Underclass
She and others argue that tech companies intentionally downplay the importance of human feedback. Such obfuscation “sockets away some of the most unseemly elements of these technologies,” such as hateful content and misinformation that humans have to identify, Myers West told me—not to mention the conditions the people work under.
The Atlantic
Jul 26, 2023
Dispute over threat of extinction posed by artificial intelligence looms over surging industry
At present, essentially the way these systems work is akin to applied statistics, so they don't have any capacity for deeper understanding, don't have any capacity for empathy and certainly not sentience," Myers West added.
ABC News
Jul 21, 2023
Top tech firms commit to AI safeguards amid fears over pace of change
“We need a much more wide-ranging public deliberation and that’s going to bring up issues that companies almost certainly won’t voluntarily commit to because it would lead to substantively different results, ones that may more directly impact their business models,” said Amba Kak, the executive director of research group the AI Now Institute.
The Guardian
Jul 21, 2023
How judges, not politicians, could dictate America’s AI rules
“It seems like the more straightforward path [toward an AI rulebook is] to start with the existing laws on the books,” says Sarah Myers West, the managing director of the AI Now Institute, a research group.
MIT Technology Review
Jul 17, 2023
Google’s AI for Medicine Shows Clinical Answers More Than 90% Accurate
“There's all kinds of information that you would want to know, in order to meaningfully evaluate a system before it's deployed into commercial use,” she [Sarah Myers West] said. “And you need to look at this system at the level of each hospital, if they're going to be doing any kind of customization of a system for a particular clinical setting.”
Bloomberg
Jul 12, 2023
AI Is Hurting the Climate in a Number of Non-Obvious Ways
There is no absolute definition for what an AI technology is. But usually, as Amba Kak, the executive director of the AI Now Institute, describes, AI refers to algorithms that process large amounts of data to perform tasks like generating text or images, making predictions, or calculating scores and rankings.
The Markup
Jul 6, 2023
The FTC’s biggest AI enforcement tool? Forcing companies to delete their algorithms
“It really gets to the core of what is a common practice in the tech industry to use wide swaths of data, not necessarily for the purpose under which the data was originally obtained,” said Sarah Myers West, managing director of AI Now and a former FTC adviser.
Cyberscoop
Jul 5, 2023
Stop talking about tomorrow’s AI doomsday when AI poses risks today
Letters written by tech-industry leaders are “essentially drawing boundaries around who counts as an expert in this conversation”, says Amba Kak, director of the AI Now Institute in New York City, which focuses on the social consequences of AI.
Nature
Jun 27, 2023
8 /
19 