On the Societal Impact of Open Foundation Models

Adding precision to the debate on openness in AI

This post is authored by Sayash Kapoor, Rishi Bommasani, Daniel E. Ho, Percy Liang, and Arvind Narayanan. The paper has 25 authors listed here. Last October, President Biden signed the Executive Order on Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy AI. It tasked the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) with preparing a report on the benefits and risks of open foundation models—foundation models with widely available model weights (such as Meta's Llama 2 and Stability's Stable Diffusion). There is widespread disagreement about the impact of openness on society, which the NTIA…

related reading

• On the Societal Impact of Open Foundation Modelscrfm.stanford.edu
• Are open foundation models actually more risky than closed ones?normaltech.ai
• On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Modelsarxiv.org
• A Safe Path to Open Weights - Thinking Machines Labthinkingmachines.ai
• Google "We Have No Moat, And Neither Does OpenAI"semianalysis.com
• The future of foundation models is closed-sourceblog.johnluttig.com
• [2108.07258] On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Modelsarxiv.org
• [2608.07514] Open Technical Problems in Open-Weight AI Model Risk Managementarxiv.org
• What the executive order means for openness in AInormaltech.ai
• Is the future of AI open or closed? Watch today’s Princeton-Stanford workshopnormaltech.ai
• Our position on open-weights models \ Anthropicanthropic.com
• Stanford CRFMcrfm.stanford.edu