We (along with researchers from Berkeley and Stanford) are co-authors on today’s paper led by Google Brain researchers, Concrete Problems in AI Safety. The paper explores many research problems around ensuring that modern machine learning systems operate as intended.
We’ve written a paper arguing that long-term AI safety research needs social scientists to ensure AI alignment algorithms succeed when actual humans are involved. Properly aligning advanced AI systems with human values requires resolving many uncertainties related to the psychology of human rationality, emotion, and biases.
The article "Math for AI safety: an invitation for mathematicians" calls for new mathematical tools to ensure AI remains understandable, controllable, and cooperative. It outlines specific mathematical fields—logic, game theory, probability, algebra, representation theory, analysis, and geometry—each paired with an open problem tailored for mathematicians without AI safety background. The piece invites researchers to contribute to designing AI that is legible, steerable, and aligned with human values.
One step towards building safe AI systems is to remove the need for humans to write goal functions, since using a simple proxy for a complex goal, or getting the complex goal a bit wrong, can lead to undesirable and even dangerous behavior. In collaboration with DeepMind’s safety team, we’ve developed an algorithm which can infer what humans want by being told which of two proposed behaviors is better.
arXiv:2408. 02379v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Developing and certifying safe - or so-called trustworthy - AI has become an increasingly salient issue, especially in light of upcoming regulation such as the EU AI Act.
Google DeepMind researches AI's harmful manipulation risks across areas like finance and health, leading to new safety measures.
Ensuring that AI systems are built, deployed, and used safely is critical to our mission.
arXiv:2502. 12445v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: AI safety is a rapidly growing area of research that seeks to prevent the harm and misuse of frontier AI technology, particularly with respect to generative AI (GenAI) tools that are capable of creating realistic and high-quality content through text prompts.
We’ve written a policy research paper identifying four strategies that can be used today to improve the likelihood of long-term industry cooperation on safety norms in AI: communicating risks and benefits, technical collaboration, increased transparency, and incentivizing standards. Our analysis shows that industry cooperation on safety will be instrumental in ensuring that AI systems are safe and beneficial, but competitive pressures could lead to a collective action problem, potentially causing AI companies to under-invest in safety.
We’re proposing an AI safety technique which trains agents to debate topics with one another, using a human to judge who wins.
Artificial general intelligence has the potential to benefit nearly every aspect of our lives—so it must be developed and deployed responsibly.
arXiv:2505. 22829v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper bridges distribution shift and AI safety through a comprehensive analysis of their conceptual and methodological synergies.
