AI RISKSSafeguarding the Future in the AI Era: Q&A with Sella Nevo
The most imminent risk, even if it’s not the worst-case scenario, is cyberattacks. We’ve seen rapid improvement in AI cyber capabilities, and the progress is not going to stop. Now, of course, this can also help defenders. But there are good reasons to think that, in the near term, these capabilities will be offense-dominant.
Sella Nevo spent years pushing the boundaries of artificial intelligence to save and improve human lives. His focus now is on developing policies to promote the safe and effective use of AI and biotechnology. His mandate at RAND: to help ensure the most pivotal technologies of our time benefit humanity rather than endanger it.
Nevo directs the RAND Center on AI, Security, and Technology (CAST). Its purpose is to provide evidence-based insights at the intersection of emerging technologies and national security—and to shape policies that protect global security while advancing the public good. That means identifying ways to foster beneficial uses of AI, including in cybersecurity, while preventing AI from creating the next bioweapon or launching the next cyberattack.
Nevo came to RAND from Google. He led a team there that used machine learning to tackle humanitarian and global development challenges, including forecasting floods. He’s an expert in information security, especially as it applies to advanced technology. His work on protecting AI model weights, which encode everything an AI model has learned, set a standard for security now used in many frontier AI labs.
You’ve been at the forefront of studying both the promise and the danger of advanced AI. Let’s start with the promise. What AI capabilities do you expect to make headlines a year from now?
I’ll share some future capabilities that I’m excited about, and maybe they’ll be here in a year. But no promises.
The most obvious one is on the coding side. We already see the models breaking out impressive capabilities there. One thing we don’t have yet, but I think we might in a year, is world-quality software on command. The models will be able to build more, better, and much more personalized software.
We’re also seeing an incredibly rapid pace of improvement in mathematics. If we could get 10 times, or 100 times, the pace of mathematical discovery, we could unlock a lot of solutions in security, material sciences, and other fields. It would far surpass any other era of incredible discovery.
