Update October 3, 2024
Now we wait for the new California Legislative session in 2025 to develop a proposal that balances the dual goals of supporting innovation while achieving safe and secure AI. Surely having a testing process and a protocol for dealing high impact events are smart and fundamental components of any future legislative proposals.
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September 20, 2024.
Can innovation and safety go hand in hand? State Legislators are pushing California Governor Gavin Newsom to sign the Safe and Secure Innovation for Frontier Artificial Intelligence Models Act (SB1047) resting on his desk. Will the SSIFAIMA become the new acronym we must learn (and may I suggest AIMA for short)?
Among its requirements, the bill would obligate "developers" training AI foundation models at a certain compute level (computing power greater than 10^26 integer or floating point operations) to take various safety measures to protect the public from cyber attacks on critical infrastructure, prevent AI from being used to develop chemical, nuclear or biological weapons, or enable automated crime. Those obligations include making it possible to quickly and fully shut the model down, ensuring the model is protected against “unsafe post-training modifications,” and post deployment, maintaining testing procedures to evaluate whether a model or its derivatives is especially at risk of “causing or enabling a critical harm.” It also includes the creation of a Frontier Model Division, which would be overseen by a new Board of Frontier Models composed of representatives from the open-source community, AI industry, academia, and government. Support and opposition to the bill has not fallen predictably - with some AI organizations and members of the U.S. Congress in favor while others are opposed. Newsom has said he is interested in AI bills that can solve today’s problems without upsetting California’s booming AI industry. Whether a hint or a misdirection, we won’t know for up to another week.
If Governor Newsom signs the bill, California, similar to Colorado earlier this year, will have taken an historic step to proactively ensure an exciting new technology protects the public interest as it advances new and important benefits in everything from logistics to healthcare.
If signed, organizations will have a few years to incorporate the requirements into governance, technical workflow and assessment processes. If not signed, organizations may consider adding some concepts into their digital governance frameworks.