OpenAI Unveils "Preparedness Framework" to Address Risks of Harmful AI

OpenAI, the artificial intelligence unicorn and creator of ChatGPT, on Monday, Dec 18 shared a “Preparedness Framework” to tackle the serious risks of harmful AI. Notably, the framework will grant the board veto power, allowing it to modify safety decisions as deemed necessary.

In a same-day post on OpenAI’s blog, the company states that “The study of frontier AI risks has fallen far short of what is possible and where we need to be. To address this gap and systematize our safety thinking, we are adopting the initial version of our Preparedness Framework. It describes OpenAI’s processes to track, evaluate, forecast, and protect against catastrophic risks posed by increasingly powerful models.”

Per the preparedness framework, OpenAI has enacted three safety teams—A safety systems team focused on mitigating the misuse of current models like ChatGPT, a superalignment team to build the foundations of safety for superalignement models that may show up in the future, and a preparedness team that maps out the emerging risks of frontier models.

MIT AI professor Aleksander Madry will lead the preparedness team. In his role, he will hire AI researchers, computer scientists, national security experts, and policy professionals to monitor the tech, continually test it, and warn the company if it believes any of its AI capabilities are becoming dangerous - via the Washington Post.

Moving forward, the Microsoft-backed AI mammoth will only release nascent AI tech to the public if it is deemed safe in specific areas such as cybersecurity and nuclear threats.

Still CEO, after a dizzying leadership saga last month, Altman has consistently touted the need for a staggered release of more powerful AI models to the public. The goal of this being to allow us to understand the technology’s evolving capabilities and potentially “catastrophic” risks.

This, perhaps, powers his Worldcoin vision—an iris-scanning crypto project that aims to create a global identity and financial network. This, he maintains, is vital because “in a world with a lot of AI, knowing who is human matters more and more.”

In our ongoing HackerNoon Technology Poll, we want to know how you feel about Altman’s Worldcoin initiative.

Join the conversation here.

Open AI ended the week at #2449 on HackerNoon’s Tech Company Rankings.

Patent Dispute Threatens Apple’s $17 Billion Watch Business

Apple confirmed on Monday, Dec 18, that it would halt sales of its Series 9 and Ultra 2 smartwatches in the U.S. as it straddles a patent dispute with medical technology company Masimo.

At the start of this year, a U.S. judge ruled in favor of Masimo’s claim that the most successful company in the world had infringed its oximetry patent by importing and selling Apple watches with pulse oximetry functionality - Reuters reported.

Fast forward to October, the U.S. International Trade Commission issued an order that would potentially bar Apple from importing its watches, doing severe damage to its 56% share of the U.S. smartwatch market.

The decision to ban is under review by President Biden until the 25th of December. And if the decision is not vetoed by then, the ban will go into effect on Boxing Day.

Days away from a not-so-great boxing day for the trillion-dollar company, Apple is working around the clock to save the affected line of smartwatches. As Bloomberg reports, this rescue mission involves software fixes and potential changes in the algorithms that measure a user’s blood oxygen level.

Per TechCrunch, Apple believes that the ITC’s claim is inaccurate, reiterated by a lawsuit of its own against Masimo in October last year. As such, over the next few days, Apple will continue to appeal the ruling, while working around the clock to preemptively comply if it stands.

Apple holds a top 5 spot in this week’s Tech Company Rankings at #3

In Other News…

The EU goes after X (formerly Twitter) in its first illegal content probe - Reuters

Google set to pay $700 million as part of its Play Store dispute settlement - TechCrunch

Lawmakers ask the DOJ to probe Apple for shuttering iMessage apps - Bloomberg

Tesla recalls nearly all 2 million of its vehicles in the US - CNN

Pakistan’s former prime minister uses AI voice clone to campaign from prison - The Verge

This brings us to the end of this week’s Tech Company News Brief.

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See you next week!

Asher Umerie, Editor, World News & Scifi @ HackerNoon.

All rankings are current as of Monday. To see how the rankings have changed, please visit HackerNoon's Tech Company Rankings page.