Differences with formal standards writing efforts
Formal standards writing efforts tend to have very high barriers to entry. They often require that organizational fees are paid before someone can participate. To qualify for a government mandate, some efforts must also apply geographical restrictions to who can join.
Furthermore, it often takes considerable time to understand all the details of the standards process for someone to contribute effectively to a formal standards effort. It can also take a lot of effort to locate the right subcommittee to whom to make specific contributions and the right time to make them.
We have set up the AI Standards Lab to have much lower barriers to entry for collaborators and subject matter experts worldwide. This allows us to accelerate standards writing by accessing a pool of labor simply unavailable to formal standards efforts.
Another significant difference with formal standards writing is that in this lab, we focus only on encoding the state of the art in AI risk management. Formal standards writing efforts have a much broader scope: They must resolve various other difficult legal-technical and regulatory questions in consultation with their respective government(s).
The formal standards efforts we target also usually work under Chatham House rules, supplemented with additional confidentiality agreements. The lab must, therefore, operate with some confidentiality firewalls inside. Lab members who are inside formal standards efforts too will often not be able to report back to the original authors of contributions any details about how these contributions are being handled further inside their formal standards efforts.
