Many in the AI safety community want China to do more on frontier AI safety. I share the goal, but does that mean we want new rules from the state? More safety work inside AI companies? More research? Better channels between Chinese and international experts?
When I was back in China recently, I talked about AI and its risks with almost everyone I met. This is the first in a series of posts reflecting on those conversations.
If we mean regulation, China probably has one of the most comprehensive and stringent sets of rules for managing AI risks. I’ve written about one part of this system—China’s algorithm registration regime—and how it can serve as regulatory infrastructure (https://lnkd.in/e9vKhHnk).
Another thing I want to highlight is that we may be seeing a shift in how AI risks are understood in China: a very very recent CAC official’s remarks explicitly identified extreme loss of control as an emerging AI risk (See this post https://www.secrss.com/articles/93953). The question now is whether that recognition will lead to concrete requirements.
Those rules do not yet directly address the full range of extreme risks that frontier AI safety researchers worry about. But when the Chinese state treats a risk as a priority, it can move quickly (prob quicker than its western counterpart), especially when it can build on existing regulatory processes.
If we mean research: Chinese researchers are already working on frontier AI safety (see this great post on Chinese AI Safety Institute Counterparts :https://lnkd.in/eKcanyc8). We should engage with that work and the people doing it.
If we mean company practice: We need sustained relationships with Chinese AI companies, so we can have concrete conversations about capability evaluations, incident reporting and safeguards as models advance.
I would like to hear a more precise version of the call for “more AI safety in China”: more of what, from whom, and how can we help make it happen? Probably next post I will reflect that
Many in the AI safety community want China to do more on frontier AI safety. I share the goal, but does that mean we want new rules from the state? More safety work inside AI companies? More research? Better channels between Chinese and international experts?
When I was back in China recently, I talked about AI and its risks with almost everyone I met. This is the first in a series of posts reflecting on those conversations.
If we mean regulation, China probably has one of the most comprehensive and stringent sets of rules for managing AI risks. I’ve written about one part of this system—China’s algorithm registration regime—and how it can serve as regulatory infrastructure (https://lnkd.in/e9vKhHnk).
Another thing I want to highlight is that we may be seeing a shift in how AI risks are understood in China: a very very recent CAC official’s remarks explicitly identified extreme loss of control as an emerging AI risk (See this post https://www.secrss.com/articles/93953). The question now is whether that recognition will lead to concrete requirements.
Those rules do not yet directly address the full range of extreme risks that frontier AI safety researchers worry about. But when the Chinese state treats a risk as a priority, it can move quickly (prob quicker than its western counterpart), especially when it can build on existing regulatory processes.
If we mean research: Chinese researchers are already working on frontier AI safety (see this great post on Chinese AI Safety Institute Counterparts
:https://lnkd.in/eKcanyc8). We should engage with that work and the people doing it.
If we mean company practice: We need sustained relationships with Chinese AI companies, so we can have concrete conversations about capability evaluations, incident reporting and safeguards as models advance.
I would like to hear a more precise version of the call for “more AI safety in China”: more of what, from whom, and how can we help make it happen? Probably next post I will reflect that