Filling gaps in trustworthy development of AI

The range of application of artificial intelligence (AI) is vast, as is the potential for harm. Growing awareness of potential risks from AI systems has spurred action to address those risks, while eroding confidence in AI systems and the organizations that develop them. A 2019 study found over 80 organizations that published and adopted "AI ethics principles'', and more have joined since. But the principles often leave a gap between the "what" and the "how" of trustworthy AI development. Such gaps have enabled questionable or ethically dubious behavior, which casts doubts on the trustworthiness of specific organizations, and the field more broadly. There is thus an urgent need for concrete methods that both enable AI developers to prevent harm and allow them to demonstrate their trustworthiness through verifiable behavior. Below, we explore mechanisms (drawn from arXiv:2004.07213) for creating an ecosystem where AI developers can earn trust - if they are trustworthy. Better assessment of developer trustworthiness could inform user choice, employee actions, investment decisions, legal recourse, and emerging governance regimes.

Learning an Unreferenced Metric for Online Dialogue Evaluation

Evaluating the quality of a dialogue interaction between two agents is a difficult task, especially in open-domain chit-chat style dialogue. There have been recent efforts to develop automatic dialogue evaluation metrics, but most of them do not generalize to unseen datasets and/or need a human-generated reference response during inference, making it infeasible for online evaluation. Here, we propose an unreferenced automated evaluation metric that uses large pre-trained language models to extract latent representations of utterances, and leverages the temporal transitions that exist between them. We show that our model achieves higher correlation with human annotations in an online setting, while not requiring true responses for comparison during inference.

Release Strategies and the Social Impacts of Language Models

Large language models have a range of beneficial uses: they can assist in prose, poetry, and programming; analyze dataset biases; and more. However, their flexibility and generative capabilities also raise misuse concerns. This report discusses OpenAI's work related to the release of its GPT-2 language model. It discusses staged release, which allows time between model releases to conduct risk and benefit analyses as model sizes increased. It also discusses ongoing partnership-based research and provides recommendations for better coordination and responsible publication in AI.