Artificial Intelligence Index Report 2024

The 2024 Index is our most comprehensive to date and arrives at an important moment when AI's influence on society has never been more pronounced. This year, we have broadened our scope to more extensively cover essential trends such as technical advancements in AI, public perceptions of the technology, and the geopolitical dynamics surrounding its development. Featuring more original data than ever before, this edition introduces new estimates on AI training costs, detailed analyses of the responsible AI landscape, and an entirely new chapter dedicated to AI's impact on science and medicine. The AI Index report tracks, collates, distills, and visualizes data related to artificial intelligence (AI). Our mission is to provide unbiased, rigorously vetted, broadly sourced data in order for policymakers, researchers, executives, journalists, and the general public to develop a more thorough and nuanced understanding of the complex field of AI. The AI Index is recognized globally as one of the most credible and authoritative sources for data and insights on artificial intelligence. Previous editions have been cited in major newspapers, including the The New York Times, Bloomberg, and The Guardian, have amassed hundreds of academic citations, and been referenced by high-level policymakers in the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union, among other places. This year's edition surpasses all previous ones in size, scale, and scope, reflecting the growing significance that AI is coming to hold in all of our lives.

Fairness in Reinforcement Learning: A Survey

While our understanding of fairness in machine learning has significantly progressed, our understanding of fairness in reinforcement learning (RL) remains nascent. Most of the attention has been on fairness in one-shot classification tasks; however, real-world, RL-enabled systems (e.g., autonomous vehicles) are much more complicated in that agents operate in dynamic environments over a long period of time. To ensure the responsible development and deployment of these systems, we must better understand fairness in RL. In this paper, we survey the literature to provide the most up-to-date snapshot of the frontiers of fairness in RL. We start by reviewing where fairness considerations can arise in RL, then discuss the various definitions of fairness in RL that have been put forth thus far. We continue to highlight the methodologies researchers used to implement fairness in single- and multi-agent RL systems before showcasing the distinct application domains that fair RL has been investigated in. Finally, we critically examine gaps in the literature, such as understanding fairness in the context of RLHF, that still need to be addressed in future work to truly operationalize fair RL in real-world systems.

Escalation Risks from Language Models in Military and Diplomatic Decision-Making

Governments are increasingly considering integrating autonomous AI agents in high-stakes military and foreign-policy decision-making, especially with the emergence of advanced generative AI models like GPT-4. Our work aims to scrutinize the behavior of multiple AI agents in simulated wargames, specifically focusing on their predilection to take escalatory actions that may exacerbate multilateral conflicts. Drawing on political science and international relations literature about escalation dynamics, we design a novel wargame simulation and scoring framework to assess the escalation risks of actions taken by these agents in different scenarios. Contrary to prior studies, our research provides both qualitative and quantitative insights and focuses on large language models (LLMs). We find that all five studied off-the-shelf LLMs show forms of escalation and difficult-to-predict escalation patterns. We observe that models tend to develop arms-race dynamics, leading to greater conflict, and in rare cases, even to the deployment of nuclear weapons. Qualitatively, we also collect the models' reported reasonings for chosen actions and observe worrying justifications based on deterrence and first-strike tactics. Given the high stakes of military and foreign-policy contexts, we recommend further examination and cautious consideration before deploying autonomous language model agents for strategic military or diplomatic decision-making.

International Governance of Civilian AI: A Jurisdictional Certification Approach

This report describes trade-offs in the design of international governance arrangements for civilian artificial intelligence (AI) and presents one approach in detail. This approach represents the extension of a standards, licensing, and liability regime to the global level. We propose that states establish an International AI Organization (IAIO) to certify state jurisdictions (not firms or AI projects) for compliance with international oversight standards. States can give force to these international standards by adopting regulations prohibiting the import of goods whose supply chains embody AI from non-IAIO-certified jurisdictions. This borrows attributes from models of existing international organizations, such as the International Civilian Aviation Organization (ICAO), the International Maritime Organization (IMO), and the Financial Action Task Force (FATF). States can also adopt multilateral controls on the export of AI product inputs, such as specialized hardware, to non-certified jurisdictions. Indeed, both the import and export standards could be required for certification. As international actors reach consensus on risks of and minimum standards for advanced AI, a jurisdictional certification regime could mitigate a broad range of potential harms, including threats to public safety.

Analyzing And Editing Inner Mechanisms Of Backdoored Language Models

Recent advancements in interpretability research made transformer language models more transparent. This progress led to a better understanding of their inner workings for toy and naturally occurring models. However, how these models internally process sentiment changes has yet to be sufficiently answered. In this work, we introduce a new interpretability tool called PCP ablation, where we replace modules with low-rank matrices based on the principal components of their activations, reducing model parameters and their behavior to essentials. We demonstrate PCP ablations on MLP and attention layers in backdoored toy, backdoored large, and naturally occurring models. We determine MLPs as most important for the backdoor mechanism and use this knowledge to remove, insert, and modify backdoor mechanisms with engineered replacements via PCP ablation.