Second Progress Report Towards Ambitions of the AI Safety Institute

The second progress report highlights developments in foundational AI safety research, including tripling the research team's capacity and establishing the UK's AI Research Resource, Isambard-AI . Efforts to facilitate information exchange have resulted in partnerships with Apollo Research and OpenMined, engagement with over 30 countries, and demonstrations at the Bletchley Summit on key areas of risk.

The AISI has set three priority areas to achieve its ambitions, including evaluations of advanced AI models, conducting foundational AI Safety research and facilitating information exchange. These are the key commitments from the second progress report:

1) Foundational AI Safety research

Building a team of researchers in government

Tripled the capacity of their technical research team
Recruited Jade Leung, a leading expert in safety protocols and governance of frontier AI systems, and Rumman Chowdhury, an expert in evaluating social harms from frontier models. Jade joins the team from OpenAI; Rumman from Humane Intelligence.
The Taskforce has supported the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) and the University of Bristol in establishing the UK’s AI Research Resource (AIRR), Isambard-AI, an AI supercomputer on which we will be able to conduct more compute intensive safety research.
Prepared a cutting-edge research programme; the initial results of which will be showcased on Day 1 of the Summit.

Compute power

The University of Bristol will soon host the first component of the UK’s AI Research Resource, Isambard-AI, which will itself be one of the most powerful supercomputers in Europe when built. It will have thousands of state-of-the-art GPUs and will vastly increase our public-sector AI compute capacity. There is more to do, but these great strides fundamentally change the kind of projects researchers can take on inside the Institute.

2) Facilitating Information exchange

Addition of partnerships with Apollo Research, evaluating models and OpenMined, developing and deploying technical infrastructure.
Taskforce and Summit teams in the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology have visited and engaged at Ministerial and/or senior level with over 30 countries across the world.
Announcement of 10-minute demonstrations on Day 1 of the summit in 4 key areas of risk: misuse, societal harm, loss of human control and unpredictable progress

You can read more about the first and third progress reports and the ambitions of the institute.

If you would like to learn more, please email t[email protected].

Tess Buckley

Programme Manager - Digital Ethics and AI Safety, techUK

Authors

Tess Buckley

Programme Manager, Digital Ethics and AI Safety, techUK

Tess is the Programme Manager for Digital Ethics and AI Safety at techUK.

Prior to techUK Tess worked as an AI Ethics Analyst, which revolved around the first dataset on Corporate Digital Responsibility (CDR), and then later the development of a large language model focused on answering ESG questions for Chief Sustainability Officers. Alongside other responsibilities, she distributed the dataset on CDR to investors who wanted to further understand the digital risks of their portfolio, she drew narratives and patterns from the data, and collaborate with leading institutes to support academics in AI ethics. She has authored articles for outlets such as ESG Investor, Montreal AI Ethics Institute, The FinTech Times, and Finance Digest. Covered topics like CDR, AI ethics, and tech governance, leveraging company insights to contribute valuable industry perspectives. Tess is Vice Chair of the YNG Technology Group at YPO, an AI Literacy Advisor at Humans for AI, a Trustworthy AI Researcher at Z-Inspection Trustworthy AI Labs and an Ambassador for AboutFace.

Tess holds a MA in Philosophy and AI from Northeastern University London, where she specialised in biotechnologies and ableism, following a BA from McGill University where she joint-majored in International Development and Philosophy, minoring in communications. Tess’s primary research interests include AI literacy, AI music systems, the impact of AI on disability rights and the portrayal of AI in media (narratives). In particular, Tess seeks to operationalise AI ethics and use philosophical principles to make emerging technologies explainable, and ethical.

Outside of work Tess enjoys kickboxing, ballet, crochet and jazz music.