Why a New Class of AI “Judgment Models” Could Have Big Business Implications

Nathaniel Whittemore (0:00)

It's not every day that we get a new model to play around with, and it's certainly not every day that we get an entirely new approach to model building with some fairly different implications for how we even use it. Today though, we are talking about a new class of models which you might refer to as AI judgment models. Rather than producing long strings of text, these judgment models like the one we're discussing today, Jev from TypeSafe, produce probabilities around specific questions. Is this customer angry? Is there a new dependency in this email? Do we need to change the operational plan because of this? Today, we're exploring the idea behind these models, how they're trained differently, how they can produce these judgments much more quickly and much less expensively, and most importantly, where they're going to fit in your overall model stack.

The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI.

Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief headlines edition, all the daily AI news that you need in around five minutes. The AI safety discourse continues to trickle out through the tech industry as well as mainstream society. But for now, unless something absolutely seismic happens, we're going to move it into the headlines and away from the main episode. With that in mind, after staying quiet over the weekend, Mark Zuckerberg has made his thoughts known on this idea of an AI slowdown. On Tuesday, Zuckerberg wrote in a post on X, Every lab has the responsibility and incentive to move at the pace required to train its models safely and the ability to take its own actions to ensure that happens. Basically, his view is that pacing is the responsibility of individual labs rather than a collective action. And that view hinges on two core ideas. First, that quote, People don't want to use agents that are misaligned with them and that don't do what they ask so labs have a strong natural incentive to make their models more aligned. And two, labs face significant liability if their models cause harm, so they have a strong incentive to prevent this as well. Emphasizing the point, Zuckerberg said that Meta had delayed the release of MEWS by several months to work on safety. He continued, We didn't call for everyone else to do this before we would. We just did it as part of our day-to-day work because it was clearly the right thing for people and for us.

Essentially, Zuckerberg is saying that the individual incentives and consequences that are already in place are enough to force AI labs to work on alignment and to pace the frontier correctly rather than needing some exogenous government-enforced slowdown. Now, Zuckerberg did support the idea of independent evaluators and advisors as a matter of best practice rather than regulation. He claimed that Meta has already engaged outside evaluators, not because it's required of them, but because it helps produce better work. Finally, he concluded, Committing the significant majority of compute towards serving people rather than racing towards recursive self-improvement is one of the best ways to ensure that we develop this technology safely. Meta has made this commitment and other labs can do this as well. I believe the key to building a positive future for everyone is maintaining the right balance of power. This is within our power to do.

It's carefully worded, but basically this whole thing says, come on guys, let's please stop with the theatrics. And a lot of people, frankly, found this a breath of fresh air. YouTuber Joseph Carlson wrote, Hold up a minute, you are telling me companies can slow down, make sure things are safe without telling all their competitors to slow down? And I would say that broadly speaking, reactions fell into one of two categories. The first was like that one and like this from Matthew Berman, love this, model safety and alignment is a feature and economically incentivized. Or Bill Ackman who simply called this the proper approach to AI development. But then on the other side were those arguing effectively that Zuckerberg just does not have the trust or standing to make this argument regardless of the merits of the argument itself.

Hard Fork's Kevin Ruse wrote, Whether you're a Democrat or a Republican, an EA or an EACC, I think we can all agree that the person best suited to protect us against the harms of powerful new technology is Mark Zuckerberg.

Now meanwhile, over in Strange Bedfellows Daily, Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon have joined forces to call for human-centric AI regulations in the strangest alliance of this political cycle. The two highly ideological leaders spoke from the same stage on Tuesday at the Future of Life Institute's Pro-Human Assembly in Washington. Sanders told the crowd, If the lives of every man, woman and child are going to be fundamentally changed by this technology, then the people of this country must make decisions about AI and not just a handful of oligarchs. Bannon had very similar remarks stating, The American citizens are not going to be supplicants to the oligarchs anymore. We can't do it. This is a hinge in history. We have to handle this correctly. To handle it correctly, number one, we can never trust what an oligarch says.