Main Goal:

Build the datacenter lie detector. Or at least figure out good approaches to technical challenges around network taps, workload re-execution or physical security/data integrity/confidentiality. Or creative ways to catch black site AI clusters.

Methodologies and contributions:

To verifiy that a ML workload was computed as claimed, one can re-compute inputs and outputs on a secure, verifier-controlled device.

Open problems around workload re-execution are probably quite accessible for beginners to work on, since the hardware needed for experimentations can be rented (rather cheaply) via the cloud. Key problems to solve here revolve around non-determinism, red-teaming and threat modeling.

More context: https://nacicankaya.substack.com/p/catching-misreporting-about-ml-hardware

One can collect evidence of what an ML cluster is doing, by capturing network traffic with dedicated devices that hash what they observe, without revealing confidential data directly.

Network tap work is heavy on physical engineering, but maybe you have unique skills and access.

Even without those, you can contribute to open questions around threat modeling: What covert workloads are possible at what covert I/O bandwidths in what parts of the datacenter network?

More context: https://nacicankaya.substack.com/p/catching-misreporting-about-ml-hardware-bd2

Preventing secret AI clusters is above even my paygrade, but there are cool ideas to explore for how to approach this, given political will and/or manufacturer-cooperation. The supply chain of some key components is both international and constrained by multiple critical chokepoints, which could be a promising opportunity to fully account for what hardware exists or why has it. Also, even if there was an established "ground truth" for which hardware exists, how could inspection catch decoys, diversion and gaps?

I am also interested in political angles to this. The debate around "AI arms race" has become quite toxic and zero-sum minded, and this needs to change. I appreciate good ideas for what to do about this. Generally, I think that "stop doing X" activism is less impactful than "we figured out a better way, and this is how".