Building Trust: Foundations of Security, Safety and Transparency in AI

This p aper explore s the rapidly evolving ecosystem of publicly available AI models, and their potential implications on the s ecurit y and s afet y lands cape. A s AI models become increasingly prevalent, understanding their potential risks and vulnerabilitie s is crucial. We review the current s ecurit y and s afet y s cenarios while highlighting challenge s such as tracking issue s, remediation, and the app arent abs ence of AI model lifecycle and ownership proce ss e s. Comprehensive strategie s to enhance s ecurit y and s afet y for both model developers and end-us ers are propos ed. This p aper aims to provide s ome of the foundational piece s for more standardized s ecurit y, s afet y, and transp arency in the development and operation of AI models and the larger open ecosystems and communitie s forming around them. Generative AI, a branch of artificial intelligence focus ed on AI produc tion of content such as text, image s and video, has s een significant advancement s since the introduc tion of generative advers arial net works (GANs) in 2014 (Goodfellow et al., 2014), which improved data generation but faced issue s like training instabilit y. The development of transformers and s elf at tention mechanisms in 2017 (Vaswani et al., 2017) facilitated further improvement s in natural language proce ssing, leading to large language models (LLMs) like GPT (Radford et al., 2018) with highly advanced text generation cap abilitie s. Dif fusion models (S ohl-Dickstein et al., 2015) have als o s een rapid advancement in image and video generation. This rapid advancement in technology cap abilit y has been matched by an equally rapid uptake in adoption. A s with any new technology, it is worth noting that the industr y is still identif ying new and valuable us e s for AI and the s e market predic tions may fluc tuate as us e cas e s are te sted in real world environment s with real world problems. For the purpos e of clarit y we shall be using the term public model, for a model which is publicly available for download and us e. LLMs are the next evolution of data s cience, a field focus ed on math and data. Unlike traditional systems and applications which rely on logic and programming for a specified outcome, large language model development t ypically consist s of architec ture re s earch and de sign, which is then coded.