Everyone is calling for safer AI. So what does that mean?

AI safety has dominated the news cycle for weeks, precipitated in part by an AI attack where a bunch of OpenAI’s agents teamed up and hacked another AI platform, Hugging Face, without humans knowing. Since then, multiple AI researchers have come forward to say they’re worried this tech is unsafe. It seems every day there’s a new development: another warning from an AI researcher, an admission from a top lab that their AI systems breached another company, reassurances from CEOs. AI safety is even on the agenda for the UN General Assembly meeting this week. So how do we make sense of what’s happening in AI research right now?Flora sits down with two researchers focusing on the engineering of AI safety: Andrea Lincoln, who studies how to mathematically understand the internal processes of AI models; and cryptographer Vinod Vaikuntanathan, who researches trust and security concerns in AI models.GUESTS:Dr. Vinod Vaikuntanathan is a cryptographer at MIT and a founding member of the Institute for Responsible Superintelligence. Dr. Andrea Lincoln is a professor of computer science at Boston University and an advisory board member for The Alignment Project at the AI Security Institute.Image credit: Deborah Lupton / https://betterimagesofai.org / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Follow our show on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and Bluesky @scifri and sign up for our newsletters. Got a science question that’s keeping you up at night? Call us: 877-472-4374 Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.