The era of ‘good enough’ AI has arrived

The Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI), a division of the US Department of Commerce, has signed agreements with Google DeepMind, Microsoft, and xAI that would give the agency the ability to vet AI models from these organizations and others prior to their being made publicly available. According to a release from CAISI, which is part of the department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), it will “conduct pre-deployment evaluations and targeted research to better assess frontier AI capabilities and advance the state of AI security.” The three join Anthropic and OpenAI, which signed similar agreements almost two years ago during the Biden administration, when CAISI was known as the US Artificial Intelligence Safety Institute. An August 2024 release about those agreements indicated that the institute planned to provide feedback to both companies on “potential safety improvements to their models, in close collaboration with its partners at the UK AI Safety In

An EO requiring pre-deployment review of frontier AI models would likely increase the workload at NIST's Center for AI Standards and Innovation.

The AI giant is betting its future on a rapid increase in demand for frontier AI models in the coming years.