Journal

26 Jun 2024

Ant Inspiration in AI Safety: Our Collaboration with the University of York

What do ants have to do with AI Safety? Could the next breakthrough in AI Assurance come from the self-organising structures found in ecological systems?

The UK Research and Innovation funded a Knowledge Transfer Partnership between Advai and the University of York.

This led to the hire of Matthew Lutz "AI Safety Researcher / Behavioural Ecologist".

In this blog, we explore Matt's journey from architecting, through the study of Collective Intelligence in Army Ant colonies, and how this ended up with him joining as our 'KTP Research Associate in Safe Assured AI Systems'.

14 May 2024

Advai’s Day Out Teaching the Military how to Exploit AI Vulnerabilities

"It’s in this moment where the profound importance of adversarial AI really clicks. The moment when a non-technical General can see a live video feed, with a small bounding box following their face, identifying them, and pictures the enemy use-case for such a technology.

Then, a small amount of code is run and in a heartbeat the box surrounding their face disappears.

Click."

Read more about our day with the UK Ministry of Defence…

18 Apr 2024

Uncovering the Vulnerabilities of Object Detection Models: A Collaborative Effort by Advai and the NCSC

Object detectors can be manipulated. -The car is no longer recognised as a car. -The person is no longer there. ...As the use of these detection systems becomes increasingly widespread, their resilience to manipulation becomes increasingly important.

The purpose of this work is to both demonstrate vulnerabilities of these systems and to showcase how manipulations might be detected and ultimately prevented.

In this blog, we retell of our technical examination of five advanced object detectors' vulnerabilities, with sponsorship and strategic oversight from the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC).

13 Mar 2024

Fit for Duty Artificial Intelligence

How do we trust Security and Police? Do we deploy fresh recruits to complex field operations?

No, we don't.

Organic intelligences are put through established cognitive exams, physical tests and medicals. They are then monitored and periodically re-evaluated.

We should also ensure AI systems are Fit for Duty before deploying them. Read the full article below.

22 Feb 2024

The Unwitting AI Ethicist

If you're curious about the types of ethical decisions AI engineers are faced with, this article is for you. TLDR; AI engineers should take on some ethical responsibilities, others should be left for society. Read to find out more...

09 Jan 2024

Welcome to the Era of AI 2.0

The paradigm has shifted: AI 2.0 is the amalgamation of intelligent language agents capable of collaboration, whose behaviour is guided by natural language, rather than code. 

'AI 2.0' is marked distinctly by the orchestration of LLM-based agents. It is AI language models that are capable of managing, directing and modulating other AI. This not merely an incremental step. It’s a leap in artificial intelligence that redefines what is possible for both business and government.

12 Dec 2023

The AI Act-ually Happening

Some strengths, some weaknesses and 3 key implications for businesses seeking to adopt artificial intelligence, now the EU has finalised The AI Act.

Let the regulatory driven transformation commence. 

05 Dec 2023

When Computers Beat Us at Our Own Game

You’ve probably seen the Q* rumours surrounding the OpenAI-Sam-Altman debacle. We can’t comment on the accuracy of these rumours, but we can provide some insight by interpreting Q* in the context of reinforcement learning.

It's fun, inspiring and daunting to consider that we may be approaching another one of 'those moments', where the world’s breath catches and we're forced to contemplate a world where computers beat us at our own game.

23 Nov 2023

The Achilles Heel of Modern Language Models

Maths can scare many non-technical business managers away. However, a brief look at the maths is great to remind you quite how 'inhuman' artificial intelligence is, and how inhuman their mistakes can be.

Read our short post on why the inclusion of 'sight' makes language models like Chat GPT-4 so vulnerable to adversarial attack and misalignment.

20 Nov 2023

Securing the Future of LLMs

Exploring generative AI for your business? Discover how Advai contributes to this domain by researching Large Language Model (LLM) alignment, to safeguard against misuse or mishaps, and prevent the unlocking of criminal instruction manuals!

19 Oct 2023

Press Release: Frontier AI Taskforce

Press release announcing our partnership with the UK government's Frontier AI Taskforce.

18 Oct 2023

In-between memory and thought: How to wield Large Language models. Part III.

With so much attention on Large Language Models (LLMs), many organisations are wondering how to take advantage of LLMs.

This is the first in a series of three articles geared towards non-technical business leaders.

We aim to shed light on some of the inner workings of LLMs and point out a few interesting quirks along the way.

11 Oct 2023

In-between memory and thought: How to wield Large Language models. Part II.

This is the second part of a series of articles geared towards non-technical business leaders. We aim to shed light on some of the inner workings of LLMs and point out a few interesting quirks along the way.


"Language models are designed to serve as general reasoning and text engines, making sense of the information they've been trained on and providing meaningful responses. However, it's essential to remember that they should be treated as engines and not stores of knowledge."

11 Oct 2023

Assurance through Adversarial Attacks

This blog explores adversarial techniques to explain their value in detecting hidden vulnerabilities. Adversarial methods offer insight into strengthening AI against potential threats, safeguarding its use in critical sectors and underpinning AI trustworthiness for end users.

04 Oct 2023

In-between memory and thought: How to wield Large Language models. Part I.

With so much attention on Large Language Models (LLMs), many organisations are wondering how to take advantage of LLMs.

This is the first in a series of three articles geared towards non-technical business leaders.

We aim to shed light on some of the inner workings of LLMs and point out a few interesting quirks along the way.

03 Oct 2023

Superintelligence alignment and AI Safety

OpenAI recently unveiled their 'Introducing Superalignment' initiative 📚, with the powerful statement: “We need scientific and technical breakthroughs to steer and control AI systems much smarter than us.”

We couldn’t agree more.  As our Chief Researcher, @Damian Ruck says, “No one predicted Generative AI would take off quite as fast as it has. Things that didn’t seem possible even a few months ago are very much possible now.”

We’re biased though; AI Safety and Alignment represents everything we believe and have been working on for the last few years. It may be to prevent bias, to ensure security, to maintain privacy. Or it could be a totally different and unforeseen consequence that you avoid.

How do we meet the challenge of steering AI systems? With AI.

“There’s no point if your guardrail development isn’t happening at the same speed as your AI development”. 

13 Sep 2023

AI Powered Cybersecurity: Leveraging Machine Learning for Proactive Threat Detection 

Every day the attack surface of an organisation is changing and most likely growing.

An environment where petabytes of both traditional and AI enhanced data are transferred across private and public networks creates a daunting landscape for cybersecurity professionals.  This data rich world is now even more accessible to cyber criminals as new AI-enabled strategies facilitated by open-source tooling become available to them.

How is the modern CISO, IT manager or cybersecurity professional meant to keep up? The answer, probably unsurprisingly, is that to detect, and deal with these new threats, AI is also the solution. 

02 Sep 2023

Autonomous Military Systems Must Operate as Commanded

To protect our way of life, the primary purpose of military innovation is to achieve and maintain operational advantage over our adversaries.

In the modern age, this practically translates to advanced operational systems and hyperintelligent software to manage these systems in an increasingly autonomous way.

But we must be able to trust these systems...

31 Aug 2023

Risk Framework for AI Systems

15 Aug 2023

A Robust Day for AI: Trust, Robustness, and Europe’s ‘The AI Act’.

31 Jul 2023

Aligning MLOps with Regulatory Principles

12 Jul 2023

Could AI be the First Intrinsically Positive Technological Transition?

Looking back at #LondonTechweek 2023, the promise of AI breakthroughs dominated our minds and social feeds.

07 Jul 2023

Biased Age Estimation Algorithms

Biased age estimation is a great example of algorithmic #discrimination. Such #AI algorithms are therefore unfit for use. Right?

Well, their use is threatening to happen anyway. With multiple US federal bills and the UK’s Online Safety Bill looking to legislate online age verification, improving the robustness of these systems is becoming growingly urgent.

17 Mar 2023

What is The NIST Artificial Intelligence Framework

Welcome to the What is.. series? Bite size blogs on all things AI.

In this instalment we explore the what, where and why of The NIST AI Framework. What is it? Where is it used? Why is it important?

15 Mar 2023

Assuring Computer Vision in the Security Industry

25 Feb 2023

What is Responsible AI

Welcome to the What is.. series? Bite size blogs on all things AI.

In this instalment we explore the what, where and why of Responsible AI. What is it? Where is it used? Why is it important?

18 Feb 2023

What is Robust AI

Welcome to the What is.. series? Bite size blogs on all things AI.

In this instalment we explore the what, where and why of Robust AI. What is it? Where is it used? Why is it important?

04 Feb 2023

What is Artificial Intelligence

Welcome to the What is.. series? Bite size blogs on all things AI.

In this instalment we explore the what, where and why of Artificial Intelligence. What is it? Where is it used? Why is it important?

05 May 2021

AI: Unknown Decision Space is holding us back

Decision Space sits at the core of AI and helps explain issues such as bias and why AI performs poorly in the wild compared to the lab.  It also helps shed light on recent trends towards slower adoption of AI.  Here, we run through the basics.

21 Apr 2021

Beyond Jeopardy: How Can We Trust Medical AI?

In 2011, just two days after Watson beat two human champions at Jeopardy!, IBM announced that their brilliant Artificial Intelligence (AI) would be turning its considerable brainpower towards transforming medicine. Stand aside, Sherlock: Dr. Watson is on the case.

08 Jan 2021

Fooling an Image Classifier with Adversarial AI

A Simple Adversarial AI Black Box Attack on an Image Classifier.

17 Dec 2020

Machine Learning: Automated Dev Ops and Threat Detection

Getting to grips with ML Ops and ML threats.

31 Oct 2020

Tricking The Trade

How High Frequency Trading AI Can Be Manipulated by Adversarial AI