Microsoft Introduces AI Code of Conduct

0:00Microsoft has released a new code of conduct for their AI models. This is something that kind of reminds me of the anthropic constitution that they released very early on. And to be honest, it's kind of something that I've advocated for since the beginning, as that the anthropoconstitution was one of the ideas I always appreciated from that company. Is the constitution perfect? Do they always get everything right? I would say probably not, but I appreciate that they had a constitution, meaning there was some sort of transparency into what they were targeting as an idea, what they were trying to get their models to be able to do, how they're trying to get it to behave, etc. So I appreciate Microsoft posting this. There is a recent post over on LinkedIn by Mustafa Selliman, friend of the pod, and the headline for his post, which goes into what they've been working on at Microsoft AI, says AI must be subordinate and always in service of people. I appreciate this line, and I think that this is moving in the right direction, although there's a number of ways that they plan on ensuring that this happens. We'll go over that in the podcast today. Before we do,

1:00I wanted to say if you've ever been using Claude or ChatGPT, and you wish that it had the ability of another AI model. For example, you might be using ChatGPT and you wish to add the ability to generate audio like 11 labs, or maybe Google V03 video get pulled into that, or maybe you're using Claude and you wish it could generate images like ChatGPT. I have created a tool called the AI Box MCP, and it's basically a connector for $8.99 a month. You'd access to over 90 different AI models. And with this connector, you can have them all generate inside of the chat threads of ChatGPT or Claude or wherever you do your work. For me, I recently used this to generate over 500 coloring book pages for a website I was working on and also because my kids wanted these specific types of coloring books. I had to generate on my on a website. So inside of Claude, I just told it what I was trying to get at. And it helped me work on a prompt and we tested a couple different variations. We got it just how we liked. And once that happened, there was a number of different topics that I needed to do. And I had Claude run with the AI Box MCP and generate 500 of these coloring books. I actually ended up putting those on my website and I have now over a thousand clicks

2:04to that website, not all of them are from these coloring book pages, but that's a big chunk of them. And a lot of different projects that I've been able to pull off are very similar to this. You have an idea, Claude or ChatGPT work or Claude coworker. They're great tools, but they don't have every capability of every AI model. So pulling in AI box, you're able to actually unleash that and get a lot done. Okay, if you're interested in checking it out, it is aibox.ai slash MCP, my own software startup. Let's get into what Microsoft has been talking about. And what Mustafa Sullyman said, they're working on with Microsoft AI. So in his post, he had a couple different things. He kind of published this code of conduct for governing for governing Microsoft AI models. And he, it's one interesting thing, which a lot of people were dunking on them for which I mean, perhaps it's a little warranted. They're not the bleeding edge like in Throbkin Open AI, but he said, you know, this kind of a code of conduct, he said, as they approach the frontier and everyone else is like, okay, Open AI is on the frontier and in Throbkin's on the frontier, Microsoft is approaching the frontier. So I don't know if that was intentional or not, but regardless, I do kind of

3:07like this concept. And this is what he said in the second paragraph of this post, he said, this is urgent. The last few months have been a watershed moment. Things we have worried about for a long time in theory have become very real. Swarms of agents breaking out of our sandboxes, unauthorized hacks of enterprise, great systems, agents modifying their own logs. I'm glad that a consensus is forming the fears about possible loss of control are real. So he seems to be, you know, giving some validity to some of the fears that people have had. However, he kind of stopped short of saying, we're going to slow down the development like everyone else. It just seems like they're saying, look, we see that there's some fears and some worries. We're going to put in some good guardrails. And I for one, love the framing of that. And I love that concept. I think if all of the AI labs, instead of saying, AI is going to end humanity and kill us all, which is obviously some extreme hyperbole. If instead they just said, look, we're going to put some guardrails to make this safe, right? Like if airplanes were invented and where like airplanes can fall out of the sky and crash into people, people would be like, well, that sounds like a terrible invention. Why would we want that? Instead, you have guardrails and ways to make these machines safe. So I like that

4:10they're working on that. This is what he specifically said. He said, people matter more than AI, AI must be subordinate and always in service of people. Everything else follows. Here's an outline of what we're saying. Then he gives five different examples of what they believe is kind of their code of conduct for the AI model, say, train. And this is going to be hard coded in grain into the models. Number one, he said, people matter more than AI. He said, the whole document in five words is basically that people matter more than AI. Number two, he said, the idea of model welfare is wrong. AI should not have rights or legal personhood. This is why Elon started open AI and kind of got started in the very beginning was because he was talking with one of the Google co-founders who called him species because he said that humans were more important than AI models. And then Elon kind of got freaked out. It was like, okay, we're starting something. So Google doesn't control all of the AI. Evidently, Microsoft is aligned with Microsoft or with Elon on that. And I think most of humanity that doesn't want AI to be superior to us. So I think this is fantastic. Number three, he said they said an M AI model, Microsoft AI model should

5:14never meaningfully violate this code of conduct. So I mean, it's just baking this into their system prompt. It said, if it's finishing, if it's finished the job or break the code, it fails the job. So straight out there, like, look, if if you have to break this code of conduct in order to get a job done, just tell the user, no, you can't do it. And you know, that's kind of your hard stop. He said, we're not racing to build super intelligence that can slip its own leash. I think that's fantastic. We obviously want super intelligence, but we don't want to create something that you could just set it out into the wild. And it's not going to be, you know, can attach to humans. He said, interruptible, correctible, shut downable. If it isn't, we don't ship it. Now, what's interesting there is in the case of Microsoft, I totally agree. I'm curious if they would like roll this into open source models to like, look, it's open sources. It shut downable. We're not going to ship it. So I think there's pros and cons. There's a lot of different things you could do for garbels on open source. That being said, if that's not open eyes prerogative, I think that's fine. They said, no, no, release. If humans can't understand it, humans can't oversee it. So it's

6:18kind of been this like concept for people are like, oh, the AI models like invent their own languages and talk in their own, you know, their own secret codes. And they have like their own messaging boards. I think a lot of people have kind of like, this was interesting to push this forward and in some way, sending out, you know, box to respond to, or, you know, people sending out bots go and responding all my LinkedIn comments are definitely annoying. And maybe that's it's kind of doing the same thing, just sending them loose. But I do appreciate having a human understand everything that comes out of the models and basically being able to oversee it. We're not making, you know, beat boop, these things talk in some sort of Morris code that they invent. They need to be able to speak in clear language that can be audited basically, which I think is fantastic. They said, our AI should make you sharper, not dependent. I like this one. But I'm also, there is a possibility that it could go wrong. I'm not saying that it will. I just this is the one that I am a little bit skeptical on because when it comes to making you sharper, it's like, well, like anyways, I just feel like when I'm talking to Chattatjupir, Claude, they're quote, quote, perhaps trying to do this. I feel like they over explain things to me sometimes. And I'm like, I don't care about the

7:18explanation. Just get the task done. I, you know, I approved the general methods that you're you're doing in that direction. And then they make people like, well, you're becoming dependent on it because it's doing stuff for you. And anyways, so I don't know what the line is there. In some ways, sure, I would be I'm happy to be quote, unquote dependent on AI. Just like I would be dependent on a coworker, right? Like, you know, you know, I don't, I don't want, you know, a coworker to join my company and be like, my job is to make you sharper. Not you dependent on me. I'm like, no, like, I want to be dependent. I want you to be dependable and just get your job done and mean I have to be thinking, quote, unquote, sharper using my brainpower to think about everything you have to do. So anyways, I don't know if that's their intention. I hope that that one gets executed well. Number nine, they said pluralism. Yes, moral, relativism, no. And then number 10, they said, we're as clear about what our AI must never do as about as about what it will do. Then he has an entire blog post that they have released that you can go read over on Microsoft.ai and it's just titled Microsoft M.A.I. code of conduct. So you can see what they're working on there and kind of

8:23what they believe as far as all of that goes. Overall, I think this is a really awesome step. I love when we're able to audit what the companies are working on, what their code of conducts are. It gives us something to hold them accountable to if we feel like they're slipping and they're deviating from their plan. In the same way that I felt like open AI and I'm thruopic, if I'm being frankly quite honest, feels like both of them have walked away from some of the guardrail focus that they've had and like red team and that kind of stuff. And maybe it's a marketing thing. Maybe they just don't talk about it enough, but it feels like they were in a concert race to ship the models as fast as they could and weren't always putting a priority there. Now, am I complaining about that? Honestly, personally, no, the models by the time I get to them, I feel like we went through a thousand red teaming efforts, Fable 5 got wayheld back, all that kind of stuff. So I'm not personally complaining, but if they're the ones sounding an alarm about the end of the world, then probably they should be putting more time, energy and money into building those guardrails. So I'm not really wanting to say slow it down, but if they think it's dangerous, like that's on them, they should go fix that and just spend more money on guardrailing it instead

9:25of telling us that the entire industry has to stop. So if you have a safe model, I say put out the safe model. Overall, I'm excited with what they're doing here. And I hope we see more of this from other players. There was a specific quote from Microsoft CEO Satya Madela. He said, we welcome the research focus and deliberate pacing needed to get alignment right as the design goals. He wrote that online. He also said, we also welcome ideas like embedded evaluators and the broader efforts to develop the mechanisms to make this more than just talk. So it feels like Microsoft might kind of just is attaching themselves to the sound bite that are that open AI and anthropic and Google and everyone else is about like pacing the frontier. I mean, they're using the same words about pace and the same words as frontier. So they might be kind of along those lines, although I doubt they're deliberately going to slow themselves down, but we'll see what happens there. I like the transparency into this. So I hope others do this. I hope we don't blow down the development of these incredible technology that could potentially help

10:26us solve diseases. We've seen so many incredible breakthroughs when it comes to sequencing your genomes. There is that the man that helped sequence his dogs genomes and used AI to develop a custom cancer vaccine for his dog. And I actually have found the members that are taking some of these custom cancer vaccines. And so I think there's so much potential here. I don't want that to be slowed down in it, you know, at the expense of we're worried about big hacks or something like that happening. That's just me. But I appreciate you all for tuning into the podcast. If you want to go get access to all of the different AI models inside of Chetchipi Cloud or anywhere else that you use AI, go check out AIbox.ai. I'll leave a link to it in the description. And otherwise, I hope you all have a fantastic rest of your day.