Wednesday, September 13th 2023
NVIDIA Lends Support to Washington's Efforts to Ensure AI Safety
In an event at the White House today, NVIDIA announced support for voluntary commitments that the Biden Administration developed to ensure advanced AI systems are safe, secure and trustworthy. The news came the same day NVIDIA's chief scientist, Bill Dally, testified before a U.S. Senate subcommittee seeking input on potential legislation covering generative AI. Separately, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang will join other industry leaders in a closed-door meeting on AI Wednesday with the full Senate.
Seven companies including Adobe, IBM, Palantir and Salesforce joined NVIDIA in supporting the eight agreements the Biden-Harris administration released in July with support from Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Inflection, Meta, Microsoft and OpenAI.
The commitments are designed to advance common standards and best practices to ensure the safety of generative AI systems until regulations are in place, the White House said. They include:
In his testimony, Dally told the Senate subcommittee that government and industry should balance encouraging innovation in AI with ensuring models are deployed responsibly. The subcommittee's hearing, "Oversight of AI: Rules for Artificial Intelligence," is among actions from policymakers around the world trying to identify and address potential risks of generative AI.
Earlier this year, the subcommittee heard testimonies from leaders of Anthropic, IBM and OpenAI, as well as academics such as Yoshua Bengio, a University of Montreal professor considered one of the godfathers of AI. Dally, who leads a global team of more than 300 at NVIDIA Research, shared the witness table on Tuesday with Brad Smith, Microsoft's president and vice chair. Dally's testimony briefly encapsulated NVIDIA's unique role in the evolution of AI over the last two decades.
How Accelerated Computing Sparked AI
He described how NVIDIA invented the GPU in 1999 as a graphics processing unit, then fit it for a broader role in parallel processing in 2006 with the CUDA programming software. Over time, developers across diverse scientific and technical computing fields found this new form of accelerated computing could significantly advance their work.
Along the way, researchers discovered GPUs also were a natural fit for AI's neural networks, because they require massive parallel processing. In 2012, the AlexNet model, trained on two NVIDIA GPUs, demonstrated human-like capabilities in image recognition. That result helped spark a decade of rapid advances using GPUs, leading to ChatGPT and other generative AI models used by hundreds of millions worldwide.
Today, accelerated computing and generative AI are showing the potential to transform industries, address global challenges and profoundly benefit society, said Dally, who chaired Stanford University's computer science department before joining NVIDIA.
AI's Potential and Limits
In written testimony, Dally provided examples of how AI is empowering professionals to do their jobs better than they might have imagined in fields as diverse as business, healthcare and climate science. Like any technology, AI products and services have risks and are subject to existing laws and regulations that aim to mitigate those risks.
Industry also has a role to play in deploying AI responsibly. Developers set limits for AI models when they train them and define their outputs. Dally noted that NVIDIA released in April NeMo Guardrails, open-source software developers can use to guide generative AI applications in producing accurate, appropriate and secure text responses. He said that NVIDIA also maintains internal risk-management guidelines for AI models.
Eyes on the Horizon
Making sure that new and exceptionally large AI models are accurate and safe is a natural role for regulators, Dally suggested. He said that these "frontier" models are being developed at a gigantic scale. They exceed the capabilities of ChatGPT and other existing models that have already been well-explored by developers and users. Dally urged the subcommittee to balance thoughtful regulation with the need to encourage innovation in an AI developer community that includes thousands of startups, researchers and enterprises worldwide. AI tools should be widely available to ensure a level playing field, he said.
During questioning, Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) asked Dally why NVIDIA announced in March it's working with Getty Images. "At NVIDIA, we believe in respecting people's intellectual property rights," Dally replied. "We partnered with Getty to train large language models with a service called Picasso, so people who provided the original content got remunerated."
In closing, Dally reaffirmed NVIDIA's dedication to innovating generative AI and accelerated computing in ways that serve the best interests of all.
Source:
NVIDIA
Seven companies including Adobe, IBM, Palantir and Salesforce joined NVIDIA in supporting the eight agreements the Biden-Harris administration released in July with support from Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Inflection, Meta, Microsoft and OpenAI.
- Testing the safety and capabilities of AI products before they're deployed
- Safeguarding AI models against cyber and insider threats, and...
- Using AI to help meet society's greatest challenges, from cancer to climate change.
In his testimony, Dally told the Senate subcommittee that government and industry should balance encouraging innovation in AI with ensuring models are deployed responsibly. The subcommittee's hearing, "Oversight of AI: Rules for Artificial Intelligence," is among actions from policymakers around the world trying to identify and address potential risks of generative AI.
Earlier this year, the subcommittee heard testimonies from leaders of Anthropic, IBM and OpenAI, as well as academics such as Yoshua Bengio, a University of Montreal professor considered one of the godfathers of AI. Dally, who leads a global team of more than 300 at NVIDIA Research, shared the witness table on Tuesday with Brad Smith, Microsoft's president and vice chair. Dally's testimony briefly encapsulated NVIDIA's unique role in the evolution of AI over the last two decades.
How Accelerated Computing Sparked AI
He described how NVIDIA invented the GPU in 1999 as a graphics processing unit, then fit it for a broader role in parallel processing in 2006 with the CUDA programming software. Over time, developers across diverse scientific and technical computing fields found this new form of accelerated computing could significantly advance their work.
Along the way, researchers discovered GPUs also were a natural fit for AI's neural networks, because they require massive parallel processing. In 2012, the AlexNet model, trained on two NVIDIA GPUs, demonstrated human-like capabilities in image recognition. That result helped spark a decade of rapid advances using GPUs, leading to ChatGPT and other generative AI models used by hundreds of millions worldwide.
Today, accelerated computing and generative AI are showing the potential to transform industries, address global challenges and profoundly benefit society, said Dally, who chaired Stanford University's computer science department before joining NVIDIA.
AI's Potential and Limits
In written testimony, Dally provided examples of how AI is empowering professionals to do their jobs better than they might have imagined in fields as diverse as business, healthcare and climate science. Like any technology, AI products and services have risks and are subject to existing laws and regulations that aim to mitigate those risks.
Industry also has a role to play in deploying AI responsibly. Developers set limits for AI models when they train them and define their outputs. Dally noted that NVIDIA released in April NeMo Guardrails, open-source software developers can use to guide generative AI applications in producing accurate, appropriate and secure text responses. He said that NVIDIA also maintains internal risk-management guidelines for AI models.
Eyes on the Horizon
Making sure that new and exceptionally large AI models are accurate and safe is a natural role for regulators, Dally suggested. He said that these "frontier" models are being developed at a gigantic scale. They exceed the capabilities of ChatGPT and other existing models that have already been well-explored by developers and users. Dally urged the subcommittee to balance thoughtful regulation with the need to encourage innovation in an AI developer community that includes thousands of startups, researchers and enterprises worldwide. AI tools should be widely available to ensure a level playing field, he said.
During questioning, Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) asked Dally why NVIDIA announced in March it's working with Getty Images. "At NVIDIA, we believe in respecting people's intellectual property rights," Dally replied. "We partnered with Getty to train large language models with a service called Picasso, so people who provided the original content got remunerated."
In closing, Dally reaffirmed NVIDIA's dedication to innovating generative AI and accelerated computing in ways that serve the best interests of all.
31 Comments on NVIDIA Lends Support to Washington's Efforts to Ensure AI Safety
Government and corporations are like bleach and ammonia. Both are bad, mixing them is FAR worse.
"Separately, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang will join other industry leaders in a closed-door meeting on AI Wednesday with the full Senate."
A bunch of billionaires in a closed-door meeting with the full Senate. Why would this meeting need to be closed-door? Billionaires and politicians having secret meetings that the general populace isn't privy to? If that's not special treatment for the rich by the taxpayer-funded government, I don't know what is.
This is how things got as bad as they are. I hope Bernie throws something at their heads.
These people control the flow of information. What government wouldn't want to court them?
I envision a future where the result of the marriage between advanced robotics and automation may very well lead to the near-complete replacement of both the low-skill and the specialized workforce, which will be left to fend for itself. There is still relative safety in trade jobs, but even those are in jeopardy. This will happen, it's not if, it's just a matter of when.
You know, I'm somewhat sad about having been born in the early 1990's. I haven't lived through the period where the foundation of modern society and technology was developed, and I won't live long enough to see the fruit of the early days of the space age. Instead, we have this transitional period ahead of us in which I am sure that difficulty and violence are sure to follow.
Having a government that's in bed with big business like that is inherently dangerous.I know, but what's disturbing in this case is how brazen they're being about it. Previously, it wasn't disclosed when it occurred because they knew that they were doing wrong. Now they're trying to make it seem...
But we stray dangerously close to incurring the wrath of the mods.
ATI's contemporary at the time, the Rage Fury, did not have many of these capabilities, most notable the hardware transform and lighting, which was the killer feature back then: just as ray tracing is today and tessellation was a decade ago. These things wouldn't appear on the red side until the original Radeon in 2000. Rage 128/Fury's performance and feature set was closer to that of the RIVA TNT2, not exactly a match for the GeForce.
So while not entirely accurate to the letter, as in, "what GeForce 256 did was never seen before in history", its NV10 processor was the first one which did it all without external help, which merits Nvidia's claim to the creation of the GPU as "graphics processing unit" and not as a "3D accelerator card".
"In 1997, Rendition collaborated with Hercules and Fujitsu on a "Thriller Conspiracy" project which combined a Fujitsu FXG-1 Pinolite geometry processor with a Vérité V2200 core to create a graphics card with a full T&L engine years before Nvidia's GeForce 256; This card, designed to reduce the load placed upon the system's CPU, never made it to market."
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_processing_unit
Which was quite the achievement at the time, I think the claim has merit, until the TNT2 and the Fury, both companies only really offered combined 3D accelerators, really. Also, you ever read about the Fury Maxx? It was some sort of dual-core Rage Fury and the first to market with alternate frame rendering. They used some unorthodox dual-AGP port configuration that wasn't compatible with Windows 2000 or XP so it only really worked on Windows 98. Anandtech still has their review of it up, apparently
www.anandtech.com/show/438/
english.elpais.com/international/2023-05-24/under-elon-musk-twitter-has-approved-83-of-censorship-requests-by-authoritarian-governments.html