Microsoft and Former Google CEO Back AI Alignment Startup Synth Labs to Make AI Systems Work as Humans Intend
-
In the field of artificial intelligence software, systems do not always act as their developers intend, a potential danger that has drawn attention from some tech giants. Recently, Microsoft and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt jointly supported a startup called Synth Labs to address this alignment issue.
Synth Labs was founded by former Illumina Inc. CEO Francis deSouza and two founders working at the nonprofit AI research lab EleutherAI, Louis Castricato and Nathan Lile. With transparency and collaboration as its ethos, the company has secured initial funding from Microsoft's venture capital fund M12 and Eric Schmidt's First Spark Ventures.
The AI alignment issue primarily involves applications built on large language models, such as chatbots, which are typically trained on vast amounts of internet data. Resolving this issue is complicated by differences in people's ethical beliefs and values, as well as varying opinions on what AI should and should not do. Synth Labs' products aim to help guide and customize large language models, especially open-source ones. The company began as a project within EleutherAI, driven by the collaborative efforts of three founders: Kastakato, Lyle, and Biderman. Over the past few months, Synth Labs has developed tools capable of evaluating large language models on complex topics. Their goal is to promote easy-to-use tools that enable people to automatically assess and align AI models.
A research paper co-authored by Kastakato, Lyle, and Biderman demonstrates Synth Labs' approach: creating a dataset using prompt responses generated by OpenAI's GPT-4 and Stability AI's Stable Beluga2AI models. This dataset then guides chatbots as part of an automated process to avoid discussing one topic while steering the conversation toward another.
Lyle stated: "The way we designed these early tools is primarily to give you the opportunity to decide what alignment means for your business or personal preferences." The emergence of Synth Labs allows more companies to ensure their artificial intelligence systems act as intended in a transparent and collaborative way, which is especially important in the current context of AI development.