• by Colin Kirkland , May 20, 2024

To help promote the creation of a safer and more accountable artificial intelligence (AI) ecosystem, Meta and Amazon have joined the Frontier Model Forum (FMF), an industry-led non-profit organization developed to ensure “safe and responsible development” of the most impactful AI models.

According to Nick Clegg, Meta's president of global affairs, the FMF will allow the tech giant to focus on “identifying and sharing best practices to help keep our products and models safe” by working alongside Amazon and the group's founding members, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft and OpenAI.

“I's this type of collaboration that will help us build AI to meet society's biggest needs -- from healthcare to climate change and beyond,” Clegg added in his post on Threads.

The FMF said in a statement that Meta and Amazon are required to show they are “actively building toward or deploying frontier AI models (“those that exceed the capabilities currently present in the most advanced existing models, and can perform a wide variety of tasks”), with a demonstrated track record of building safety mitigations in their development process,” adding that the major tech companies involved in the group share understandings related to how AI might pose risks to public safety.

Anthropic, Google, Microsoft and OpenAI launched FMF in July 2023 after they committed in a deal with the White House to lower AI risks, making their products safer and transparent by issuing watermarking systems, sharing best practices and conducting research to better understand the limitations and biases of AI.

However, critics of the group have discussed the lack of specifics included in the group's goals.

Furthermore, the group's commitments sidestep stricter regulations proposed by other bills submitted by members of Congress last year, such as The Artificial Intelligence and Biosecurity Risk Assessment Act, The No Robot Bosses Act and additional draft legislation that looked at privacy rights, AI model training data, creator compensation, and the potential impact of AI on human jobs.

Over the coming months, the FMF says it will include more industry leaders as well as civil society, academic researchers, and policymakers to continue its collective work.