The Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) component said today it will soon be asking for public comment on the “risks, benefits, and potential policy” of open-weight artificial intelligence models.
What are open-weight models? According to NTIA, those models make up the core components of AI systems.
“These ‘open-weight’ models allow developers to build upon and adapt previous work, broadening AI tools’ availability to small companies, researchers, nonprofits, and individuals,” the agency said.
But, NTIA indicated, they also present something of a double-edged sword. Their use, the agency said, “may accelerate the diffusion of AI’s benefits and the pace of AI safety research, but it may also increase the scale and likelihood of harms from advanced models.”
“Model weights reflect distillations of knowledge within AI models and govern how those models behave,” NTIA explained. “Using large amounts of data, machine learning algorithms train a model to recognize patterns and learn appropriate responses. As the model learns, the values of its weights adjust over time to reflect its new knowledge.”
“Ultimately, the training process aims to arrive at a set of weights optimized to produce behavior that fits the developer’s goals,” the agency said. “If a person has access to a model’s weights, that person does not need to train the model from scratch. Additionally, that person can more easily fine-tune the model or adapt it towards different goals, unlocking new innovations but also potentially removing safeguards.”
NTIA’s call for comment on the models flows from President Biden’s AI executive order issued last October. The comment period will last for 30 days, and officially will begin when NTIA publishes a request for comment in the Federal Register, which is expected imminently. Input received through the comment request “will help inform a report to the President with NTIA’s findings and policy recommendations,” the agency said.
In particular, NTIA is asking for input on:
- The varying levels of openness of AI models;
- Benefits and risks of making model weights widely available compared to the benefits and risks associated with closed models;
- Innovation, competition, safety, security, trustworthiness, equity, and national security concerns with making AI model weights more or less open; and
- The Federal government’s role in guiding, supporting, or restricting the availability of AI model weights.
“Open-weight AI models raise important questions around safety challenges, and opportunities for competition and innovation,” said NTIA Administrator Alan Davidson.
“These models can help unleash innovation across communities by making powerful tools accessible, but that same accessibility also poses serious risks,” he said. “Our Request for Comment will help us chart a policy path to promote both safety and innovation in this important technology.”
In a similar vein, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said, “AI is an accelerator – it has the potential to make people’s existing capabilities better, faster, and stronger. In the right hands, it carries incredible opportunity, but in the wrong hands, it can pose a threat to public safety.”
“That’s why, under President Biden’s leadership and direction, we’re acting quickly and precisely to keep pace with this rapidly evolving technology to ensure safety, while protecting innovation,” she said.
