On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models
Abstract
AI is undergoing a paradigm shift with the rise of models (e.g., BERT, DALL-E, GPT-3) that are trained on broad data at scale and are adaptable to a wide range of downstream tasks. We call these models foundation models to underscore their critically central yet incomplete character. This report provides a thorough account of the opportunities and risks of foundation models, ranging from their capabilities (e.g., language, vision, robotics, reasoning, human interaction) and technical principles(e.g., model architectures, training procedures, data, systems, security, evaluation, theory) to their applications (e.g., law, healthcare, education) and societal impact (e.g., inequity, misuse, economic and environmental impact, legal and ethical considerations). Though foundation models are based on standard deep learning and transfer learning, their scale results in new emergent capabilities,and their effectiveness across so many tasks incentivizes homogenization. Homogenization provides powerful leverage but demands caution, as the defects of the foundation model are inherited by all the adapted models downstream. Despite the impending widespread deployment of foundation models, we currently lack a clear understanding of how they work, when they fail, and what they are even capable of due to their emergent properties. To tackle these questions, we believe much of the critical research on foundation models will require deep interdisciplinary collaboration commensurate with their fundamentally sociotechnical nature.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2108.07258,
title = {On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models},
author = {Rishi Bommasani and Drew A. Hudson and Ehsan Adeli and Russ Altman and Simran Arora and Sydney von Arx and Michael S. Bernstein and Jeannette Bohg and Antoine Bosselut and Emma Brunskill and Erik Brynjolfsson and Shyamal Buch and Dallas Card and Rodrigo Castellon and Niladri Chatterji and Annie Chen and Kathleen Creel and Jared Quincy Davis and Dora Demszky and Chris Donahue and Moussa Doumbouya and Esin Durmus and Stefano Ermon and John Etchemendy and Kawin Ethayarajh and Li Fei-Fei and Chelsea Finn and Trevor Gale and Lauren Gillespie and Karan Goel and Noah Goodman and Shelby Grossman and Neel Guha and Tatsunori Hashimoto and Peter Henderson and John Hewitt and Daniel E. Ho and Jenny Hong and Kyle Hsu and Jing Huang and Thomas Icard and Saahil Jain and Dan Jurafsky and Pratyusha Kalluri and Siddharth Karamcheti and Geoff Keeling and Fereshte Khani and Omar Khattab and Pang Wei Koh and Mark Krass and Ranjay Krishna and Rohith Kuditipudi and Ananya Kumar and Faisal Ladhak and Mina Lee and Tony Lee and Jure Leskovec and Isabelle Levent and Xiang Lisa Li and Xuechen Li and Tengyu Ma and Ali Malik and Christopher D. Manning and Suvir Mirchandani and Eric Mitchell and Zanele Munyikwa and Suraj Nair and Avanika Narayan and Deepak Narayanan and Ben Newman and Allen Nie and Juan Carlos Niebles and Hamed Nilforoshan and Julian Nyarko and Giray Ogut and Laurel Orr and Isabel Papadimitriou and Joon Sung Park and Chris Piech and Eva Portelance and Christopher Potts and Aditi Raghunathan and Rob Reich and Hongyu Ren and Frieda Rong and Yusuf Roohani and Camilo Ruiz and Jack Ryan and Christopher Ré and Dorsa Sadigh and Shiori Sagawa and Keshav Santhanam and Andy Shih and Krishnan Srinivasan and Alex Tamkin and Rohan Taori and Armin W. Thomas and Florian Tramèr and Rose E. Wang and William Wang and Bohan Wu and Jiajun Wu and Yuhuai Wu and Sang Michael Xie and Michihiro Yasunaga and Jiaxuan You and Matei Zaharia and Michael Zhang and Tianyi Zhang and Xikun Zhang and Yuhui Zhang and Lucia Zheng and Kaitlyn Zhou and Percy Liang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2108.07258},
year = {2022}
}
Comments
Authored by the Center for Research on Foundation Models (CRFM) at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI). Report page with citation guidelines: https://crfm.stanford.edu/report.html