3. “Labs record and respond to every incident and plan for emergencies.”-But do they do far enough with these procedures? Do BSL-4 labs publicly post cryptographic timestamps (cryptographic hashes and Merkle roots) of all their records?
Once the cryptographic timestamps are made public, people can publicly post these cryptographic timestamps on public blockchains like the Bitcoin blockchain.
I searched for these cryptographic timestamps I did not find any at any BSL-4 lab. This means that if there is a lab incident that they do not want to make public, then the lab (with the help of the government) can falsify records, but they cannot do this once the timestamps are posted on the Bitcoin blockchain.
I am still the only entity advocating for this safety measure (Aleksandr V. Kudriavtsev, Anna Vakhrusheva, and Alexander Shneider proposed in a scientific paper creating an entirely new blockchain which is much more complicated than simply asking for the BSL-4 labs to periodically tell us the hashes of all of the records; I am only expecting the BSL-4 labs to implement the most basic solutions).
And yes, cryptographic timestamps can be used for AI-safety as well in many different ways. For example, when training LLMs, if the training data came with cryptographic timestamps, the LLM has an upper bound for the time when that data has been produced (there may be other ways to do this, but since cryptographic timestamps are so easy to produce and verify, I see no reason why one should not use the added security of cryptographic timestamps). For example, if the data has a timestamp before the year 2017 when the notion of a transformer has been introduced, the LLM will know for sure that the data has not been produced by another LLM. If LLMs are trained with data produced by other LLMs and the old LLMs have the problem of making stuff up and declaring it as fact, then the future LLMs will recursively improve at making stuff up and it will be harder for LLMs to output true statements but LLMs will become better at making the statements believable.
3. “Labs record and respond to every incident and plan for emergencies.”-But do they do far enough with these procedures? Do BSL-4 labs publicly post cryptographic timestamps (cryptographic hashes and Merkle roots) of all their records?
Once the cryptographic timestamps are made public, people can publicly post these cryptographic timestamps on public blockchains like the Bitcoin blockchain.
I searched for these cryptographic timestamps I did not find any at any BSL-4 lab. This means that if there is a lab incident that they do not want to make public, then the lab (with the help of the government) can falsify records, but they cannot do this once the timestamps are posted on the Bitcoin blockchain.
I am still the only entity advocating for this safety measure (Aleksandr V. Kudriavtsev, Anna Vakhrusheva, and Alexander Shneider proposed in a scientific paper creating an entirely new blockchain which is much more complicated than simply asking for the BSL-4 labs to periodically tell us the hashes of all of the records; I am only expecting the BSL-4 labs to implement the most basic solutions).
And yes, cryptographic timestamps can be used for AI-safety as well in many different ways. For example, when training LLMs, if the training data came with cryptographic timestamps, the LLM has an upper bound for the time when that data has been produced (there may be other ways to do this, but since cryptographic timestamps are so easy to produce and verify, I see no reason why one should not use the added security of cryptographic timestamps). For example, if the data has a timestamp before the year 2017 when the notion of a transformer has been introduced, the LLM will know for sure that the data has not been produced by another LLM. If LLMs are trained with data produced by other LLMs and the old LLMs have the problem of making stuff up and declaring it as fact, then the future LLMs will recursively improve at making stuff up and it will be harder for LLMs to output true statements but LLMs will become better at making the statements believable.