Zach Stein-Perlman's Shortform

Zach Stein-Perlman

This is a special post for quick takes by Zach Stein-Perlman. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.

Some of my friends are signal-boosting this new article: 60 U.K. Lawmakers Accuse Google of Breaking AI Safety Pledge. See also the open letter. I don't feel good about this critique or the implicit ask.

Sharing information on capabilities is good but public deployment is a bad time for that, in part because most risk comes from internal deployment.
Google didn't necessarily even break a commitment? The commitment mentioned in the article is to "publicly report model or system capabilities." That doesn't say it has to be done at the time of public deployment.
1. The White House voluntary commitments included a commitment to "publish reports for all new significant model public releases"; same deal there.
2. Possibly Google broke a different commitment (mentioned in the open letter): "Assess the risks posed by their frontier models or systems across the AI lifecycle, including before deploying that model or system." Depends on your reading of "assess the risks" plus facts which I don't recall off the top of my head.
Other companies are doing far worse in this dimension. At worst Google is 3rd-best in publishing eval results. Meta and xAI are far worse.

11Zach Stein-Perlman1y

I think I'd prefer "within a month after external deployment" over "by the time of external deployment" because I expect the latter will lead to (1) evals being rushed and (2) safety people being forced to prioritize poorly.

To clarify, the primary complaint from my perspective is not that they published the report a month after external deployment per se, but that the timing of the report indicates that they did not perform thorough pre-deployment testing (and zero external testing).

And the focus on pre-deployment testing is not really due to any opinion about the relative benefits of pre- vs. post- deployment testing, but because they committed to doing pre-deployment testing, so it's important that they in fact do pre-deployment testing.

5Zach Stein-Perlman1y

Thanks. Sorry for criticizing without reading everything. I agree that, like, on balance, GDM didn't fully comply with the Seoul commitments re Gemini 2.5. Maybe I just don't care much about these particular commitments.