Uploaded March 2025 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
How safe is generative AI today? Yaron Singer, former Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at Harvard University and currently Vice President of AI and Security at Cisco, has spent the past six years developing guardrails to protect AI systems at scale. In 2019, he co-founded Robust Intelligence with Kojin Oshiba ‘18. The startup, acquired by Cisco in August 2024, evaluates commercial AI models at scale, looking for vulnerabilities and providing protection against abuse or privacy breaches.
Since the launch of ChatGPT, companies have begun integrating these AI capabilities into their products and applications using LLM application programming interfaces (APIs). These interfaces allow developers to connect AI capabilities to their software by sending inputs and receiving outputs from pre-trained models. But when hidden vulnerabilities in models exist, such integrations can cause security issues.
“We’re seeing a lot of companies who are facing this dilemma now,” Singer says. “On the one hand, they’re saying, ‘Well, we have a lot of data here. That can give us a business advantage. We can then customize our AI models according to the data to benefit our customers.’ Right. But when vulnerabilities exist and there’s potential for privacy concerns and data leakage, that becomes a huge problem.”
Read more:
harvardmagazine.com
Understanding AI Vulnerabilities: harvardmagazine.com/2025/03/artificial-intelligence-vulnerabilities-harvard-yaron-singer
Bill Gates on AI and Innovation: harvardmagazine.com/2025/02/harvard-bill-gates-ai-and-innovation
Weekly email newsletter:
#harvard #harvarduniversity #artificialintelligence #ai
How safe is generative AI today? Yaron Singer, former Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at Harvard University and currently Vice President of AI and Security at Cisco, has spent the past six years developing guardrails to protect AI systems at scale. In 2019, he co-founded Robust Intelligence with Kojin Oshiba ‘18. The startup, acquired by Cisco in August 2024, evaluates commercial AI models at scale, looking for vulnerabilities and providing protection against abuse or privacy breaches.
Since the launch of ChatGPT, companies have begun integrating these AI capabilities into their products and applications using LLM application programming interfaces (APIs). These interfaces allow developers to connect AI capabilities to their software by sending inputs and receiving outputs from pre-trained models. But when hidden vulnerabilities in models exist, such integrations can cause security issues.
“We’re seeing a lot of companies who are facing this dilemma now,” Singer says. “On the one hand, they’re saying, ‘Well, we have a lot of data here. That can give us a business advantage. We can then customize our AI models according to the data to benefit our customers.’ Right. But when vulnerabilities exist and there’s potential for privacy concerns and data leakage, that becomes a huge problem.”
Read more:
harvardmagazine.com
Understanding AI Vulnerabilities: harvardmagazine.com/2025/03/artificial-intelligence-vulnerabilities-harvard-yaron-singer
Bill Gates on AI and Innovation: harvardmagazine.com/2025/02/harvard-bill-gates-ai-and-innovation
Weekly email newsletter:
#harvard #harvarduniversity #artificialintelligence #ai
