AI + a16z

Democratizing Generative AI Red Teams

Ian Webster and Anjney Midha

Posted August 2, 2024

In this episode of the AI + a16z podcast, a16z General Partner Anjney Midha speaks with PromptFoo founder and CEO Ian Webster about the importance of red-teaming for AI safety and security, and how bringing those capabilities to more organizations will lead to safer, more predictable generative AI applications. They also delve into lessons they learned about this during their time together as early large language model adopters at Discord, and why attempts to regulate AI should focus on applications and use cases rather than the models themselves.

Here’s an excerpt of Ian laying out his take on AI governance:

“The reason why I think the future of AI safety is open source is that I think there’s been a lot of high-level discussion about what AI safety is, and some of the existential threats, and all of these scenarios. But what I’m really hoping to do is focus the conversation on the here and now. Like, what are the harms and the safety and security issues that we see in the wild right now with AI? And the reality is that there’s a very large set of practical security considerations that we should be thinking about. 

“And the reason why I think that open source is really important here is because you have the large AI labs, which have the resources to employ specialized red teams and start to find these problems, but there are only, let’s say, five big AI labs that are doing this. And the rest of us are left in the dark. So I think that it’s not acceptable to just have safety in the domain of the foundation model labs, because I don’t think that’s an effective way to solve the real problems that we see today.

“So my stance here is that we really need open source solutions that are available to all developers and all companies and enterprises to identify and eliminate a lot of these real safety issues.”

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Artificial intelligence is changing everything from art to enterprise IT, and a16z is watching all of it with a close eye. This podcast features discussions with leading AI engineers, founders, and experts, as well as our general partners, about where the technology and industry are heading.

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