The UK’s AI Safety Institute has release its evaluations platform, paving the way for safer innovation of AI models.

After establishing the AI Safety Institute, the UK is continuing to drive towards greater global collaboration on AI safety evaluations with the release of the AI Safety Institute’s homegrown Inspect evaluations platform.

Inspect is a software library enabling testers – from startups, academia, and AI developers to international governments – to assess specific capabilities of individual models and then produce a score based on their results.

The tool can be used to evaluate models in a range of areas, including their core knowledge, ability to reason, and autonomous capabilities.

Released through an open source licence, it means Inspect is now freely available for the AI community to use.

By making Inspect available to this global community, the Institute aims to help accelerate the work on AI safety evaluations being carried out across the globe, leading to better safety testing and the development of more secure models.

Available from 10 May, the UK government says it is the first time an AI safety testing platform spearheaded by a state-backed body has been released for wider use.

Sparked by some of the UK’s leading AI minds, its release comes at a crucial time in AI development, as more powerful models are expected to hit the market over the course of 2024, making the push for safe and responsible AI development increasingly crucial.

“As part of the constant drumbeat of UK leadership on AI safety, I have cleared the AI Safety Institute’s testing platform – called Inspect – to be open sourced,” secretary of state for science, innovation, and technology, Michelle Donelan said.

“This puts UK ingenuity at the heart of the global effort to make AI safe, and cements our position as the world leader in this space.

“The reason I am so passionate about this, and why I have open sourced Inspect, is because of the extraordinary rewards we can reap if we grip the risks of AI. From our NHS to our transport network, safe AI will improve lives tangibly – which is what I came into politics for in the first place.”

Recommended reading

• UK and South Korea Prepare for Next Global AI Safety Summit
• Are Facebook and Google Failing to Act on Scam Adverts?
• UK Advertises Tech Sector to Silicon Valley in New Campaign

Alongside the launch of Inspect, the AI Safety Institute, Incubator for AI (i.AI) and Number 10 will bring together leading AI talent from a range of areas to rapidly test and develop new open-source AI safety tools.

“As Chair of the AI Safety Institute, I am proud that we are open sourcing our Inspect platform,” Ian Hogarth, chair of the AI Safety Institute, said.

“Successful collaboration on AI safety testing means having a shared, accessible approach to evaluations, and we hope Inspect can be a building block for AI Safety Institutes, research organisations, and academia.

“We have been inspired by some of the leading open source AI developers – most notably projects like GPT-NeoX, OLMo or Pythia which all have publicly available training data and OSI-licensed training and evaluation code, model weights, and partially trained checkpoints. This is our effort to contribute back.

“We hope to see the global AI community using Inspect to not only carry out their own model safety tests, but to help adapt and build upon the open source platform so we can produce high-quality evaluations across the board.”