US president Joe Biden’s plan for containing the dangers of artificial intelligence already risks being derailed by congressional bean counters.
A White House executive order on AI announced in October calls on the US to develop new standards for stress-testing AI systems to uncover their biases, hidden threats, and rogue tendencies. But the agency tasked with setting these standards, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), lacks the budget needed to complete that work independently by the July 26, 2024, deadline, according to several people with knowledge of the work.
Speaking at the NeurIPS AI conference in New Orleans last week, Elham Tabassi, associate director for emerging technologies at NIST, described this as “an almost impossible deadline” for the agency.
Some members of Congress have grown concerned that NIST will be forced to rely heavily on AI expertise from private companies that, due to their own AI projects, have a vested interest in shaping standards.
The US government has already tapped NIST to help regulate AI. In January 2023 the agency released an AI risk management framework to guide business and government. NIST has also devised ways to measure public trust in new AI tools. But the agency, which standardizes everything from food ingredients to radioactive materials and atomic clocks, has puny resources compared to those of the companies on the forefront of AI. OpenAI, Google, and Meta each likely spent upwards of $100 million to train the powerful language models that undergird applications such as ChatGPT, Bard, and Llama 2.
NIST’s budget for 2023 was $1.6 billion, and the White House has requested that it be increased by 29 percent in 2024 for initiatives not directly related to AI. Several sources familiar with the situation at NIST say that the agency’s current budget will not stretch to figuring out AI safety testing on its own.
On December 16, the same day Tabassi spoke at NeurIPS, six members of Congress signed a bipartisan open letter raising concern about the prospect of NIST enlisting private companies with little transparency. “We have learned that NIST intends to make grants or awards to outside organizations for extramural research,” they wrote. The letter warns that there does not appear to be any publicly available information about how those awards will be decided.
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