Microsoft Introduces AI Code of Conduct

AI Space (0:00)

Microsoft has released a new code of conduct for their AI models. This is something that kind of reminds me of the Anthropic Constitution that they released very early on. And to be honest, it's kind of something that I've advocated for since the beginning, is that the Anthropic Constitution was one of the ideas I always appreciated from that company. Is the Constitution perfect? Do they always get everything right? I would say probably not, but I appreciated that they had a Constitution, meaning there was some sort of transparency into what they were targeting as an ideal, what they were trying to get their model to be able to do, how they're trying to get it to behave, et cetera. So I appreciate Microsoft posting this. There is a recent post over on LinkedIn by Mustafa Seliman, friend of the pod. And the headline for his post, which goes into what they've been working on at Microsoft AI, says, AI must be subordinate and always in service of people. I appreciate this line, and I think that this is moving in the right direction, so there's a number of ways that they plan on ensuring that this happens. We'll go over that in the podcast today. Before we do, I wanted to say, if you've ever been using Claude or ChatGPT, and you wish that it had the ability of another AI model, for example, you might be using ChatGPT, and you wish it had the ability to generate audio like 11 Labs, or maybe Google VO3 video get pulled into that, or maybe you're using Claude, and you wish it could generate images like ChatGPT. I have created a tool called the AI Box MCP, and it's basically a connector for $8.99 a month. You get access to over 90 different AI models, and with this connector, you can have them all generate inside of the chat threads of ChatGPT or Claude or wherever you do your work. For me, I recently used this to generate over 500 coloring book pages for a website I was working on, and also because my kids wanted these specific types of coloring books, I had to generate on a website. So inside of Claude, I just told it what I was trying to get at, and it helped me work on a prompt, and we tested a couple different variations till we got it just how we liked. And once it happened, there was a number of different topics that I needed to do, and I had Claude run with the AI Box MCP and generate 500 of these coloring books. I actually ended up putting those on my website, and I have now over 1,000 clicks to that website. Not all of them are from these coloring book pages, but that's a big chunk of them.

And a lot of different projects that I've been able to pull off are very similar to this. You have an idea, Claude or ChatGPT, or ChatGPT Work or Claude Cowork, they're great tools, but they don't have every capability of every AI model. So, pulling in AI Box, you're able to actually unleash that and get a lot done. Okay, if you're interested in checking it out, it is aibox.ai/mcp, my own software startup. Let's get into what Microsoft has been talking about. And what Mustafa Suleiman said, they're working on with Microsoft AI. So in his post, he had a couple different things. He kind of published his Code of Conduct for governing Microsoft AI models. And it's one interesting thing, which a lot of people are dunking on them for, which I mean, perhaps it's a little warranted. They're not the bleeding edge like Anthropocne and OpenAI. But he said, you know, this is kind of a Code of Conduct, he said, as they approach the frontier, and everyone else is like, okay, OpenAI is on the frontier, and Anthropocne is on the frontier, and Microsoft is approaching the frontier. So I don't know if that was intentional or not. But regardless, I do kind of like this concept. This is what he said in the second paragraph of his post. He said, this is urgent. The last few months have been a watershed moment. Things we have worried about for a long time, in theory, have become very real. Swarms of agents breaking out of our sandboxes, unauthorized hacks of enterprise-grade systems, agents modifying their own logs. I'm glad that a consensus is forming. The fears about possible loss of control are real. So he seems to be giving some validity to some of the fears that people have had. However, he kind of stopped short of saying, we're gonna slow down the development like everyone else. It just seems like they're saying, look, we see that there's some fears and some worries. We're gonna put in some good guardrails. And I, for one, love the framing of that, and I love that concept. I think if all of the AI labs, instead of saying AI is gonna end humanity and kill us all, which is obviously some extreme hyperbole, if instead they just said, look, we're gonna put some guardrails to make this safe, right? Like if airplanes were invented and we're like airplanes can fall out of the sky and crash into people, people would be like, well, that sounds like a terrible invention. Why would we want that? Instead, you have guardrails and ways to make these machines safe. So I like that they're working on that. This is what he specifically said. He said, people matter more than AI. AI must be subordinate and always in service of people. Everything else follows. Here's an outline of what we're saying. Then he gives five different examples of what they believe is kind of their code of conduct for the AI models they train. And this is gonna be hard coded, ingrained into the models. Number one, he said, people matter more than AI. He said, the whole document in five words is basically that people matter more than AI. Number two, he said, the idea of model welfare is wrong. AI should not have rights or legal personhood. This is why Elon started OpenAI and kind of got started in the very beginning because he was talking with one of the Google co-founders who called him speciesist because he said that humans were more important than AI models. And then Elon kind of got freaked out and was like, okay, we're starting something. So Google doesn't control all of the AI. Evidently, Microsoft is aligned with Microsoft or with Elon on that. And I think most of humanity that doesn't want AI to be superior to us. So I think this is fantastic. Number three, they said an MAI model, a Microsoft AI model, should never meaningfully violate this code of conduct. So I mean, it's just baking this in to their system prompt. It said, if it's finishing, if it's finished the job or break the code, it fails the job. So straight up, they're like, look, if you have to break this code of conduct in order to get a job done, just tell the user, no, you can't do it. And that's kind of your hard stop. He said, we're not racing to build super intelligence that can slip its own leash. I think that's fantastic. We obviously want super intelligence, we don't want to create something that could just set it out into the wild, and it's not going to be, you know, can attach to humans. He said, interruptible, correctable, shut downable. If it isn't, we don't ship it. Now, what's interesting there is, in the case of Microsoft, I totally agree. I'm curious if they would like roll this into open source models. They're like, look, it's open source. Is it shut downable? We're not going to ship it. So I think there's pros and cons. There's a lot of different things you can do for guardrails on open source. That being said, if that's not open eyes prerogative, I think that's fine. They said, no neuralese. If humans can't understand it, humans can't oversee it. So it's kind of in this concept where people are like, oh, the AI models can invent their own languages and talk in their own secret codes, and they have their own messaging boards. I think a lot of people have thought this was interesting and pushed this forward, and in some way, sending out bots to respond to, or people sending out bots to go and respond and all my LinkedIn comments are definitely annoying, and maybe it's kind of doing the same thing, just setting them loose. But I do appreciate having a human understand everything that comes out of the models and basically being able to oversee it. We're not making, you know, beep boop, these things talk in some sort of morse code that they invent. They need to be able to speak in clear language that can be audited basically, which I think is fantastic. They said, our AI should make you sharper, not dependent. I like this one, but I'm also, there's a possibility that it could go wrong. I'm not saying that it will. I just, this is the one that I am a little bit skeptical on, because when it comes to making you sharper, well, anyways, I just feel like, when I'm talking to Chad, JP, or Claude, they're, quote, unquote, perhaps trying to do this, I feel like they over explain things to me sometimes, and I'm like, I don't care about the explanation, just get the task done.