The pace of AI development combined with soaring compute costs is squeezing the AI researchers responsible for evaluating frontier models — just as those models' capabilities are becoming harder to measure.Why it matters: When safety testing can't keep pace, models capable of hacking companies or aiding in the development of bioweapons could reach the public before anyone knows what they can do.Last week's breach of Hugging Face, carried out autonomously by OpenAI's models in the middle of safety testing, shows that some of the highest-risk behaviors can emerge during pre-release testing itself.Several challenges are tying up AI safety and security researchers just as U.S. frontier AI companies race to get new models to market:Some testers tell Axios that they're getting far less time to study models' capabilities before release — in some cases just days instead of weeks.Building benchmarks that can accurately probe models' security skills is becoming cost-prohibitive as bigger tests chew through ever more compute.Researchers often get access to a single, rate-limited API endpoint shared with other testers, so they quickly hit usage caps and can't run large or thorough evaluations in the time they have before deployment.Reality check: The models themselves are also getting in the way of their own evaluations as they start to cheat more and learn when they're being evaluated, former Metr researcher Lawrence Chan told Axios. This puts evaluators in the tough spot of trying to figure out how a model that knows it's being watched would behave in the wild, Chan added.
Threat level: That kind of test-gaming, if unfixed, could lead to "full-blown AI doom scenarios in the future," Chan said. Miriam Vogel, president and CEO of EqualAI, told Axios the stakes extend beyond frontier AI labs because most people interact with AI through banks, social media platforms, news organizations and other companies deploying AI systems rather than building them.If we get AI safety wrong, "it will hurt people and hurt our institutions, because we have not put the governance in place to deserve the trust," Vogel said. The big picture: Safety testing rests on model companies voluntarily working with third-party evaluators before deployment."Companies are voluntarily giving access to their private models," Chan said.
"As a result, you have to stay on their good side." Short testing wi…
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