This year, CSET researchers returned to the DEF CON cybersecurity conference to explore how understandings of AI red-teaming practices have evolved among cybersecurity practitioners and AI experts. This blog post, a companion to "How I Won DEF CON’s Generative AI Red-Teaming Challenge", summarizes our takeaways and concludes with a list of outstanding research questions regarding AI red-teaming, some of which CSET hopes to address in future work.

In August 2024, CSET Research Fellow Colin Shea-Blymyer attended DEF CON, the world’s largest hacking convention to break powerful artificial intelligence systems. He participated in the AI red-teaming challenge, and won. This blog post details his experiences with the challenge, what it took to win the grand prize, and what he learned about the state of AI testing.

Artificial intelligence is becoming more integrated into the sciences. One of the scientific fields experiencing this is computational biology, which uses computer modeling to understand biological mechanisms and systems. This blog post provides an understanding of important research trends in these subject areas, and how advancements in AI can improve the speed and efficiency of computational biology to improve human health and well-being.

Now that the first set of milestones has passed for the Biden administration’s October 2023 executive order on artificial intelligence, where do things stand for biotech? This blog post gives an overview of the most recent action items, with a recap of expert commentary from CSET’s June 2024 Webinar on the AIxBio Policy Landscape.

The National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource (NAIRR) pilot provides federal infrastructure, including computational resources, to U.S. AI researchers. This blog post estimates the compute provided through the pilot’s initial six resources. We find that the total compute capacity of the initial resources is roughly 3.77 exaFLOPS, the equivalent of approximately 5,000 H100 GPUs (using the tensor cores optimal for AI). Factoring in the amount of time these resources are available for use, we find that the overall compute allocated is roughly 3.26 yottaFLOPs. The pilot is a significant first step in providing compute to under-resourced organizations, although it is a fraction of what is available to industry.

Over the past year, artificial intelligence has quickly become a focal point in K-12 education. This blog post describes new and existing K-12 AI education efforts so that U.S. policymakers and other decision-makers may better understand what’s happening in practice.

This blog post assesses how different priorities can change the risk-benefit calculus of open foundation models, and provides divergent answers to the question of “given current AI capabilities, what might happen if the U.S. government left the open AI ecosystem unregulated?” By answering this question from different perspectives, this blog post highlights the dangers of hastily subscribing to any particular course of action without weighing the potentially beneficial, risky, and ambiguous implications of open models.

As the U.S. government considers banning genomics companies from China in the Biosecure Act, it opens a broader question of how the U.S. and other market economies should deal with China’s national champions. This blog post provides an overview of BGI and how China’s industrial policy impacts technology development.

This guide provides a run-down of CSET’s research since 2019 for first-time visitors and long-term fans alike. Quickly get up to speed on our “must-read” research and learn about how we organize our work.

The recent Executive Order on the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence will have major implications for biotechnology. The EO demonstrates that the White House considers biorisk a major concern for AI safety and security. In this blog post CSET’s bio experts explain the bio-relevant takeaways of the executive order, add some additional context, and note their remaining questions about its implementation.