Owen Larter serves as the head of frontier policy and public affairs at Google DeepMind. In this role, he leads the organization's engagement strategy regarding the policy implications of advanced artificial intelligence development.
“It's also very clear that this is powerful technology that's going to have a very major impact which we're very intense to sort of think thoughtfully about. I think standards are going to play an incredibly important role in charting our courses.”
“There's also in concept, you know, a standard is just an agreed upon and repeatable way of doing something useful essentially. And this is something that we as a civilization have been doing for a long time.”
“It's like I let's just say I've never met you, you've never met me, but we both know that if we use internet protocol, if we use hypertext, then our computers can talk to each other, you know, before we even meet. In the early days of the internet, obviously the internet was just computers being connected to each other with a pipe, but there was no standardized way for them to communicate.”
“But then you obviously you developed this um encryption layer HTTP becomes HTTPS and you're able to share encrypted information in a much more secure way and that's basically what kicks off a whole boom around the internet enabled economy.”
“But also standards could be a form of protectionism. You could basically say like we want to have local champions. We don't want to be obliterated by a General Electric or a Westinghouse and so we're going to come up with these alternative technical standards.”
“You have these multistakeholder working groups that in quite a deliberate and structured process will review a proposal carry it forward put it out for opportunities to comment vote on it and then sort of either based on on consensus... eventually over the course of yeah often sort of 12 to 24 months come up with a a new standard.”
“Now, it is interesting when you think about the speed with which AI is developing because this is a technology that is covered an enormous amount of ground over the next couple of years... it's very likely that the what AI can do and the way it's going to be applied in the world will change in the coming years.”
“I think it's very likely um that the the sort of the the what AI can do and the way it's going to be applied in the world will change in in the in the coming years. It's also quite a new technology.”
“What the agent to agent standard does is essentially have like a a standardized clipboard of information that two agents will share with each other as they come together. We've contributed this as an open source standard that we think is useful to solve this particular problem.”
“I mentioned the Frontier Model Forum. This is an industry group that that we help set up that the other leading Frontier AI companies are in.”
“I mentioned the Frontier Model Forum. This is an industry group that that we help set up that the other leading Frontier AI companies are in. Really useful to be able to sort of exchange um knowledge and understanding of these uh of these developing practices.”
“The AI act as you mentioned cross reference cross references what are known as harmonized standards. So European standards um that are going to be developed to underpin the various different layers of the the air regulation high-risk systems and then also at um the model layer.”
“I think you're going to need to develop these technical standards to have the interoperability unlock for the AI world, for the agentic economy in the same way that we had there for the the internet era.”