Why US AI Act Compute Thresholds Are Misguided...
Sara Hooker is VP of Research at Cohere and leader of Cohere for AI. We discuss her recent paper critiquing the use of compute thresholds, measured in FLOPs (floating point operations), as an AI governance strategy.
We explore why this approach, recently adopted in both US and EU AI policies, may be problematic and oversimplified. Sara explains the limitations of using raw computational power as a measure of AI capability or risk, and discusses the complex relationship between compute, data, and model architecture.
Equally important, we go into Sara's work on "The AI Language Gap." This research highlights the challenges and inequalities in developing AI systems that work across multiple languages. Sara discusses how current AI models, predominantly trained on English and a handful of high-resource languages, fail to serve the linguistic diversity of our global population. We explore the technical, ethical, and societal implications of this gap, and discuss potential solutions for creating more inclusive and representative AI systems.
We broadly discuss the relationship between language, culture, and AI capabilities, as well as the ethical considerations in AI development and deployment.
Pod version: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/sh...
TOC:
[00:00:00] Intro
[00:02:12] FLOPS paper
[00:26:42] Hardware lottery
[00:30:22] The Language gap
[00:33:25] Safety
[00:38:31] Emergent
[00:41:23] Creativity
[00:43:40] Long tail
[00:44:26] LLMs and society
[00:45:36] Model bias
[00:48:51] Language and capabilities
[00:52:27] Ethical frameworks and RLHF
Sara Hooker
https://www.sarahooker.me/
/ sararosehooker
https://scholar.google.com/citations?...
https://x.com/sarahookr
Interviewer: Tim Scarfe
Refs
The AI Language gap
https://cohere.com/research/papers/th...
On the Limitations of Compute Thresholds as a Governance Strategy.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2407.05694v1
The Multilingual Alignment Prism: Aligning Global and Local Preferences to Reduce Harm
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2406.18682
Cohere Aya
https://cohere.com/research/aya
RLHF Can Speak Many Languages: Unlocking Multilingual Preference Optimization for LLMs
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2407.02552
Back to Basics: Revisiting REINFORCE Style Optimization for Learning from Human Feedback in LLMs
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.14740
Executive Order on the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-r...
EU AI Act
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/...
The bitter lesson
http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIde...
Neel Nanda interview
• Mechanistic Interpretability - NEEL N...
Scaling Monosemanticity: Extracting Interpretable Features from Claude 3 Sonnet
https://transformer-circuits.pub/2024...
Chollet's ARC challenge
https://github.com/fchollet/ARC-AGI
Ryan Greenblatt on ARC
• Solving Chollet's ARC-AGI with GPT4o
Disclaimer: This is the third video from our Cohere partnership. We were not told what to say in the interview, and didn't edit anything out from the interview.