Thoughts on AI Interoperability

A chance meeting with Jake Taylor, National Institute of Standards and Technology's (NIST) new lead for the AI Safety Institute Consortium,a led me to wonder about the interoperability of machine learning (ML) and large language model (LLM) systems. I am persuaded that these powerful technologies will be widely used, and we will likely want or even need for them to interwork. Looking at today's LLMs, one is struck by their glib ability to generate text (among other modalities). Some of these systems have been outfitted with special-purpose application programming interfaces (APIs). For example, if the LLM discovers a need to respond to a mathematical computation, it might use a specialized interface to deliver the problem to MATLABb to be processed and return a result.