OpenAI, Google, and other artificial intelligence (AI) firms will soon be obligated to report to the government regarding the development of foundation models, following the guidelines of the Defense Production Act. Recently, US Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo unveiled additional information about this forthcoming mandate during an event hosted by Stanford University’s Hoover Institute last Friday, as reported by Wired.
Raimondo stated, “We’re leveraging the Defense Production Act… to conduct a survey mandating companies to disclose each instance of training a new extensive language model, along with sharing the outcomes—the safety data—with us for review.”
These new regulations stem from President Biden’s comprehensive AI executive order unveiled last October. Within the wide array of directives, the order necessitates that companies creating any foundational model “that presents a significant risk to national security, national economic security, or national public health and safety” must inform the federal government and provide the results of safety evaluations. Foundation models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-4 and Google’s Gemini utilized in generative AI chatbots, fall under this purview. However, GPT-4 is presumed to operate below the computing power threshold that would trigger government supervision.
The primary apprehension revolves around forthcoming foundation models with unparalleled computational capabilities due to their substantial potential risk to national security. Hence, this requirement aligns with the domain of the Defense Production Act, which President Biden previously invoked in 2021 to boost the production of protective equipment and supplies during the pandemic.
During the event, Raimondo also touched upon another facet of the executive order, which entails US cloud computing providers like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft disclosing instances of foreign utilization of their services.
“We are initiating the process of compelling US cloud companies to report each occurrence of a non-US entity utilizing their cloud for training an extensive language model,” remarked Raimondo, as per Bloomberg.
The commerce secretary did not specify the timeline for the implementation of these mandates. However, an imminent announcement is anticipated, given that the deadline is today, January 28th.
