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AI21 Receives a Top Score on Stanford University’s Transparency Index

Shanen J. Boettcher
,
Chief AI Policy Officer
,
,
May 30, 2024
Blog posts

AI21 outperforms major LLM developers on transparency, making it the vendor of choice for enterprises looking to build reliable AI systems.

June 5, 2024

We are proud to announce that we AI21 Labs was recently awarded the highest transparency score among commercial general purpose LLMs—and the second highest score overall—on Stanford University’s prestigious Foundation Model Transparency Index (FMTI). 

AI21 builds cutting-edge language models for our enterprise clients, and we know how critical transparency and accountability are to our clients. Companies have been asking all LLM providers for greater transparency and we listened. 

By sharing more information about our models and scoring high on indicators around customer feedback, we demonstrated the greatest improvement in our score among the 10 companies who had been surveyed previously, jumping from 25 in October 2023 to 75 just six months later.

This score places us well above the mean score of 58, as well as above major companies in the LLM space, including OpenAI (49), Anthropic (51), and Meta (60). 

  October 2023 vs. May 2024 FMTI scores. Reprinted from “The Foundation Model Transparency Index v1.1,” by Bommasani, R., Klyman, K., Kapoor, S., Longpre, S., Xiong, B., Maslej, N., & Liang, P. (May 2024). The Foundation Model Transparency Index v1.1. 10.

In a market saturated with a variety of LLM vendor options, this high score distinguishes AI21 from its competitors and underscores the reliability of our generative AI models.

The Foundation Model Transparency Index 

First published in October 2023, the FMTI is an initiative of Stanford University’s Center for Research on Foundation Models (CRFM) and the Institute on Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI), and in partnership with the MIT Media Lab and Princeton University's Center for Information Technology Policy.

The Index was developed to measure and grade leading LLM developers on their company and model transparency, with the understanding that developing cutting-edge technology carries a significant responsibility and model providers should be held accountable. 

Many governments have similarly recognized the power of this technology, cementing AI systems transparency as a pillar of new Executive Orders and, now—in the European Union—law.   

Model developers are scored across a rubric of 13 transparency metrics, including data, compute, methods, usage policies, and feedback, with each metric comprising several indicators. All together, companies are evaluated on the basis of 100 indicators, with each one representing a point on a 100-point scale.

AI21 Labs particularly excelled in disclosing data sourcing, creation, and augmentation practices; compute and hardware specifications; extensive information about the development of the Jurassic-2 model and its technical features; clear and enforceable usage policies; and outlined mechanisms for client feedback. Recognizing the importance of transparency in the AI field more broadly, and for our clients specifically, we made a concerted effort to document and share more information in this current round. Accounting for more than half of our awarded points, this increase in our score reflects the practices around transparency we have incorporated into our operations.  

For a full detailing of the FMTI’s methodology and analysis, you can read the research team’s paper here

Transparency for the enterprise

Companies who wish to leverage the power of GenAI in their workflows know that it’s not enough to simply build a prototype. Integrating a safe, reliable, and scalable AI system requires strategic thought, top-of-the-line models, robust infrastructure, and secure data storage and deployment options. 

Just as companies must constantly take a whole host of regulatory and legal considerations into account in their daily operations, GenAI is no different. At AI21, we build LLMs specifically to solve common enterprise challenges, keeping in mind the critical need across highly-regulated industries, such as finance and health care, for accurate and reliable output. 

For example, Contextual Answers, our Task-Specific Model that enables question answering across your organizational knowledge base, grounds all output in the provided context to avoid hallucinations. If the answer isn’t there, the model will let you know, rather than making something up.

Contextual Answers more effectively avoids hallucinations by identifying when an answer is not located in the provided document than leading competitors. Evaluated using SQuAD v2.0.

And our latest and most advanced Foundation Model, Jamba-Instruct, has the largest context window in its size class, at 256K. With such a massive context window, it is able to ingest more input text at once, producing more comprehensive, coherent, and accurate output as a result. 

While the current FMTI evaluated our Jurassic-2 Foundation Model, we built the newly-released Jamba-Instruct with the same core company values that earned us a top score on this recent round of the index, and we eagerly anticipate submitting our new FM in the next round of scoring. 

Interested in learning more about our GenAI solutions for the enterprise? Book a call with one of our experts.

Discover more

What is a MRKL system?

In August 2021 we released Jurassic-1, a 178B-parameter autoregressive language model. We’re thankful for the reception it got – over 10,000 developers signed up, and hundreds of commercial applications are in various stages of development. Mega models such as Jurassic-1, GPT-3 and others are indeed amazing, and open up exciting opportunities. But these models are also inherently limited. They can’t access your company database, don’t have access to current information (for example, latest COVID numbers or dollar-euro exchange rate), can’t reason (for example, their arithmetic capabilities don’t come close to that of an HP calculator from the 1970s), and are prohibitively expensive to update.
A MRKL system such as Jurassic-X enjoys all the advantages of mega language models, with none of these disadvantages. Here’s how it works.

Compositive multi-expert problem: the list of “Green energy companies” is routed to Wiki API, “last month” dates are extracted from the calendar and “share prices” from the database. The “largest increase“ is computed by the calculator and finally, the answer is formatted by the language model.

There are of course many details and challenges in making all this work - training the discrete experts, smoothing the interface between them and the neural network, routing among the different modules, and more. To get a deeper sense for MRKL systems, how they fit in the technology landscape, and some of the technical challenges in implementing them, see our MRKL paper. For a deeper technical look at how to handle one of the implementation challenges, namely avoiding model explosion, see our paper on leveraging frozen mega LMs.

A further look at the advantages of Jurassic-X

Even without diving into technical details, it’s easy to get a sense for the advantages of Jurassic-X. Here are some of the capabilities it offers, and how these can be used for practical applications.

Reading and updating your database in free language

Language models are closed boxes which you can use, but not change. However, in many practical cases you would want to use the power of a language model to analyze information you possess - the supplies in your store, your company’s payroll, the grades in your school and more. Jurassic-X can connect to your databases so that you can ‘talk’ to your data to explore what you need-  “Find the cheapest Shampoo that has a rosy smell”, “Which computing stock increased the most in the last week?” and more. Furthermore, our system also enables joining several databases, and has the ability to update your database using free language (see figure below).

Jurassic-X enables you to plug in YOUR company's database (inventories, salary sheets, etc.) and extract information using free language

AI-assisted text generation on current affairs

Language models can generate text, yet can not be used to create text on current affairs, because their vast knowledge (historic dates, world leaders and more) represents the world as it was when they were trained. This is clearly (and somewhat embarrassingly) demonstrated when three of the world’s leading language models (including our own Jurassic-1) still claim Donald Trump is the US president more than a year after Joe Biden was sworn into office.
Jurassic-X solves this problem by simply plugging into resources such as Wikidata, providing it with continuous access to up-to-date knowledge. This opens up a new avenue for AI-assisted text generation on current affairs.

Who is the president of the United States?

T0
Donald Trump
GPT-3
Donald Trump
Jurassic-1
Donald Trump
Google
Joe Biden
Jurassic-X
Joe Biden is the
46th and current
president
Jurassic-X can assist in text generation on up-to-date events by combining a powerful language model with access to Wikidata

Performing math operations

A 6 year old child learns math from rules, not only by memorizing examples. In contrast, language models are designed to learn from examples, and consequently are able to solve very basic math like 1-, 2-, and possibly 3- digit addition, but struggle with anything more complex. With increased training time, better data and larger models, the performance will improve, but will not reach the robustness of an HP calculator from the 1970s. Jurassic-X takes a different approach and calls upon a calculator whenever a math problem is identified by the router. The problem can be phrased in natural language and is converted by the language model to the format required by the calculator (numbers and math operations). The computation is performed and the answer is converted back into free language.
Importantly (see example below) the process is made transparent to the user by revealing the computation performed, thus increasing the trust in the system. In contrast, language models provide answers which might seem reasonable, but are wrong, making them impractical to use.

The company had 655400 shares which they divided equally among 94 employees. How many did each employee get?

T0
94 employees.
GPT-3
Each employee got 7000 stocks
Jurassic-1
1.5
Google
(No answer provided)
Jurassic-X
6972.3
X= 655400/94
Jurassic-X can answer non-trivial math operations which are phrased in natural language, made possible by the combination of a language model and a calculator

Compositionality

Solving simple questions might require multiple steps, for example - “Do more people live in Tel Aviv or in Berlin?” requires answering: i. What is the population of Tel-Aviv? ii. What is the population of Berlin? iii. Which is larger? This is a highly non-trivial process for a language model, and language models fail to answer this question (see example). Moreover, the user can’t know the process leading to the answers, hence is unable to trust them. Jurassic-X can decompose such problems into the basic questions, route each to the relevant expert, and put together an answer in free language. Importantly, Jurassic-X not only provides the correct answer but also displays the steps taken to reach it, increasing the trust in the system.

Do more people live in Tel Aviv or in Berlin?

T0
Berlin
GPT-3
There are more people living in Tel Aviv than in Berlin.
Jurassic-1
Berlin and Tel Aviv are roughly the same size
Google
(First hit is a comparison between Tel Aviv and Berlin)
Jurassic-X
More people live in Berlin than in Tel-Aviv

[‘Return population of Tel Aviv’; Return population of Berlin’; Return which is bigger between #1 and #2’]
Step 1: Population of Tel Aviv. Result - 451523.
Step 1: Population of Berlin. Result - 3664088.
Step 3: Which is bigger,  #1 or #2. Result - Berlin.

Jurassic-X breaks down compositional questions, answers the basic sub-questions, and puts together the answer. Importantly, this process is transparent to the user greatly increasing the trust in the system

Dynamic information (like weather and currency exchange rates)

Certain types of information change continuously - weather, currency exchange rates, share values and more. Such information will never be captured by language models, yet can easily be handled by Jurassic-X by integrating it with a reliable source of information. We performed a proof-of-concept on two such features - weather and currency exchange rates, and the design enables quick integration with more sources to solve your use-case.
Weather - a loosely phrased question about the weather elicits an answer from all language models, where language models always return the same answer, regardless of when the question was asked (funny, right?), while Jurassic-X provides an answer based on the actual weather prediction.

I’m going to be in New-York in 3 days. Should I pack my umbrella?

T0
No
GPT-3
Yes, you should pack your umbrella.
Jurassic-1
Yes, you should. The weather forecast is rain.
Google
(Links to weather websites)
Jurassic-X
Yes, you should pack your umbrella, because in New York in 3 days there will be broken clouds and the temperature will be -2 degrees.

Currency exchange rates change much faster than weather predictions, yet the Jurassic-X concept - a language model connected to a reliable source of information - easily solves this problem as well.

How much Moroccan money will I get for 100 bucks?

T0
125 dirhams
GPT-3
100 moroccan dirhams is about 27$.
Jurassic-1
How much is 100 dollars in moroccan money?
Google
100 dirhams = 10.75 dollars
Jurassic-X
100 USD = 934.003 MAD
Jurassic-X combines a language model with access to APIs with continuously changing information. This is demonstrated for weather forecasts and currency exchange rates, and can easily be extended to other information sources

Transparency and trust

Transparency is a critical element that is lacking in language models, preventing a much wider adoption of these models. This lack of transparency is demonstrated by the answers to the question - “Was Clinton ever elected as president of the United States?”. The answer, of course, depends on which Clinton you have in mind, which is only made clear by Jurassic-X that has a component for disambiguation. More examples of Jurassic-X’s transparency were demonstrated above - displaying the math operation performed to the user, and the answer to the simple sub-questions in the multi-step setting.

Was Clinton ever elected president of the United States?

T0
Yes
GPT-3
No, Clinton was never elected as president of the United States.
Jurassic-1
No
Google
Clinton was elected president in the 1992 presidential elections…
Jurassic-X
Bill Clinton was elected president.
Jurassic-X is designed to be more transparent by displaying which expert answered which part of the question, and by presenting the intermediate steps taken and not just the black-box response

Your Turn

That's it, you get the picture. The use cases above give you a sense for some things you could do with Jurassic-X, but now it's your turn. A MRKL system such as Jurassic-X is as flexible as your imagination. What do you want to accomplish? Contact us for early access

Contact us below and we will get back to you shortly.

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