Partnership on AI

In a previous post I raised some questions around the governance or oversight of AI developments and how ethics should be considered.

Yesterday I noticed a press release on the Partnership on AI group. Amazon, DeepMind/Google, Facebook, IBM, and Microsoft have established a non-profit to establish best practices on the challenges and opportunities the field of AI brings.

One of the main tenets listed is:

We will work to maximize the benefits and address the potential challenges of AI technologies, by:

1. Working to protect the privacy and security of individuals.
2. Striving to understand and respect the interests of all parties that may be impacted by AI advances.
3. Working to ensure that AI research and engineering communities remain socially responsible, sensitive, and engaged directly with the potential influences of AI technologies on wider society.
4. Ensuring that AI research and technology is robust, reliable, trustworthy, and operates within secure constraints.
5. Opposing development and use of AI technologies that would violate international conventions or human rights, and promoting safeguards and technologies that do no harm.

This seems particularly important as momentum in the field gathers and interesting that this is a collective rather than each organisation operating independently, which up until now appears to have been the way.

What is noticeable though is the absence of other big organisations in the field such as Apple and OpenAI but it will be interesting to keep watch see how everyone actually collaborates in this space, whether part of the group or not.