Government, industry, and civil society all agree on the importance of a responsible approach to artificial intelligence (AI) development. However, for individual businesses, broad discussions around safe and responsible generative AI can appear to be abstract as compared to specific use-cases, particularly when they have very few in-house technology experts.
“Businesses need support in balancing responsibility with innovation to build trustworthy AI applications. This is why AWS has launched the AWS Responsible Generative AI Community for its customers and partners in Singapore to help harness the power of AI securely and responsibly in close alignment with AI Verify. This will be a part of our broader AWS AI Spring commitment for Singapore, to accelerate the adoption of AI and generative AI across our economy in a safe and secure manner,” said Priscilla Chong, Singapore country manager for AWS.
With growing concerns around generative AI - from bias and privacy violations to deepfakes and hallucinations – it is important to balance innovation and regulation. Like any other technology, risks do not lie in the AI system itself, but in its application and specific use cases. The practical steps that businesses operating in different sectors need to take to assess and mitigate risks are neither always clear nor the same. This is especially the case for small and medium sized enterprises, which are looking to either experiment or deploy AI but may be resource constrained. In order to unlock the significant opportunities that generative AI offers, AWS wants to help customers translate responsible AI from theory into practice.
AWS will work with the responsible generative AI community of organizations from Singapore to better understand the challenges with responsible AI, and help chart specific and practical pathways to develop safe and secure generative AI solutions, leveraging in-house AWS expertise. This includes a series of one-to-one workshops and biannual meetings with customers and partners who are part of this community of practice.
AWS will also collaborate with the community to closely align with the Infocomm Media Development Agency (IMDA) and AI Verify Foundation for additional checks and balances. This includes encouraging the use of the AI Verify toolkit, an AI governance testing framework and software toolkit that validates the performance of AI systems against a set of internationally recognised principles through standardised tests. AWS will also encourage the community to consider and comply with model frameworks published by the AI Verify Foundation, such as the soon to be launched Model Governance Framework for Generative AI.
“IMDA congratulates AWS on the launch of their responsible Gen AI community and joining AI Verify Foundation as a premier member. AWS is an important partner in harnessing the potential of AI for the public good by contributing their technical expertise to advance the sciences of AI testing, championing the building of a trusted ecosystem for AI, and helping digitally mature local enterprises innovate and develop bespoke Gen AI applications through IMDA’s GenAI x Digital Leaders initiative.” said Denise Wong, Assistant Chief Executive, Data Protection and Innovation Group at IMDA, "I look forward to seeing what we can build together for the AI powered future of Singapore."
The Digital Prosperity Asia (DPA) coalition, which includes Asian digital companies such as Codomo and Kinobi, are the first members of the AWS Responsible Generative AI Community.
“The DPA is excited to collaborate with the Responsible Generative AI Community led by AWS in close alignment with AI Verify. Our members include both companies that develop Generative AI and those that use it, which means the DPA is keenly aware of the need to develop Generative AI securely and responsibly. We look forward to providing SME and startup perspectives to this important AI policymaking initiative and supporting alignment with principles of responsible AI use in Singapore and across the region,” said Benjamin Wong, Director of the Digital Prosperity Asia Coalition and Founder of Education Technology Firm Kinobi
AWS is committed to developing AI responsibly by taking a people-centric approach that prioritizes education, science, and our customers, to integrate responsible AI, from problem definition to feature engineering and deployment. With a team of dedicated responsible AI experts, complemented by our engineering and development teams, we continually test and assess our products and services to define, measure, and mitigate concerns about accuracy, fairness, intellectual property, appropriate use, toxicity, and privacy.
Customers and partners around the world are trusting AWS to responsibly experiment with and build their generative AI solutions. From helping Salesforce build its own toxicity and bias detection models deployed on Amazon SageMaker, to Automation Anywhere trusting AWS and Anthropic to build enterprise models that will reduce hallucinations, AWS promotes fairness, governance and transparency as the core principles of responsible AI.
While the challenges sound daunting, they are not insurmountable. With the right tools and a balanced approach, the benefits of AI can greatly outpace risk. We are convinced that responsibility drives trust, trust drives adoption, and adoption drives innovation.
AWS customers and partners may reach out to their AWS Account Managers in Singapore to register their interest to join the AWS Responsible Generative AI Community.
