Tag Archives: artificial intelligence

Rapid7 Infuses Generative AI into the InsightPlatform to Supercharge SecOps and Augment MDR Services

Post Syndicated from Laura Ellis original https://blog.rapid7.com/2024/06/13/rapid7-infuses-generative-ai-into-the-insightplatform-to-supercharge-secops-and-augment-mdr-services/

Rapid7 Infuses Generative AI into the InsightPlatform to Supercharge SecOps and Augment MDR Services

In the ever-evolving landscape of cybersecurity, staying ahead of threats is not just a goal—it’s a necessity. At Rapid7, we are pioneering the infusion of artificial intelligence (AI) into our platform and service offerings, transforming the way security operations centers (SOCs) around the globe operate. We’ve been utilizing AI in our technologies for decades, establishing patented models to better and more efficiently solve customer challenges. Furthering this endeavor, we’re excited to announce we’ve extended the Rapid7 AI Engine to include new Generative AI capabilities being used by our internal SOC teams, transforming the way we deliver our MDR services.

A Thoughtful, Deliberate Approach to AI Model Deployment

At Rapid7, one of our core philosophical beliefs is that vendors – like ourselves – should not lean on customers to tune our models. This belief is showcased by our approach to deploying AI models, with a process that entails initially releasing them to our internal SOC teams to be trained and battle-tested before being released to customers via in-product experiences.

Another core pillar of our AI development principles is that human supervision is essential and can’t be completely removed from the process. We believe wholeheartedly in the efficacy of our models, but the reality is that AI is not immune from making mistakes. At Rapid7, we have the advantage of working in lockstep with one of the world’s leading SOC teams. With a continuous feedback loop in place between our frontline analysts and our AI and data science team, we’re constantly fine-tuning our models, and MDR customers benefit from knowing our teams are validating any AI-generated output for accuracy.

Intelligent Threat Detection and Continuous Alert Triage Validation

The first line of defense in any cybersecurity strategy is the ability to detect threats accurately and efficiently. The Rapid7 AI Engine leverages the massive volume of high-fidelity risk and threat data to enhance alert triage by accurately distinguishing between malicious and benign alerts, ensuring analysts can focus on only the alerts that are truly malicious. The engine has also been extended to include a combination of both traditional machine learning (ML) and Generative AI models to ensure new security alerts are accurately labeled as malicious or benign. This work boosts the signal to noise ratio, thereby enabling Rapid7 analysts to spend more time investigating the security signals that matter to our customers.

Introducing Our AI-Powered SOC Assistant

Generative AI is not just a tool; it’s a game-changer for SOC efficiency. Our AI-native SOC assistant empowers MDR analysts to quickly respond to security threats and proactively mitigate risks on behalf of our customers. Because we fundamentally believe AI should be trained by the knowledge of our teams and vetted processes, our SOC assistant utilizes our vast internal knowledge bases. Sources like the Rapid7 MDR Handbook – a resource amassed over decades of experience cultivated by our elite SOC team – enable the assistant to guide analysts through complex investigations and streamline response workflows, keeping our analysts a step ahead.

Rapid7 is further using generative AI to carefully automate the drafting of security reports for SOC analysts, typically a manual and time-intensive process. With more than 11,000 customers globally, the Rapid7 SOC triages a huge volume of activity each month, with summaries that are critical for keeping customers fully updated on what’s happening in their environment and actions performed on their behalf. While AI is a key tool to streamline report building and delivery, every report that is generated by the Rapid7 AI Engine is augmented and enhanced by our SOC teams, making certain every data point is accurate and actionable. Beyond providing expert guidance, the AI assistant also has the ability to automatically generate incident reports once investigations are closed out, streamlining the process and ensuring we can communicate updates with customers in a timely manner.

An Enabler for Secure AI/ML Application Development

We know we’re not alone in developing Generative AI solutions, and as such we’re also focused on delivering capabilities that allow our customers to implement and adhere to AI/ML development best practices. We continue to expand our support for Generative AI services from major cloud service providers (CSPs), including AWS Bedrock, Azure OpenAI service and GCP Vertex. These services can be continuously audited against best practices outlined in the Rapid7 AI/ML Security Best Practices compliance pack, which includes the mitigations outlined in the OWASP Top 10 for ML and large language models (LLMs). Our continuous auditing process, enriched by InsightCloudSec’s Layered Context, offers a comprehensive view of AI-related cloud risks, ensuring that our customers’ AI-powered assets are secure.

Rapid7 Infuses Generative AI into the InsightPlatform to Supercharge SecOps and Augment MDR Services

The Future of MDR Services is Powered by AI

The integration of Generative AI into the Insight Platform is not just about helping our teams keep pace – it’s about setting the pace. With unparalleled scalability and adaptability, Rapid7 is committed to maintaining a competitive edge in the market, particularly as it relates to leveraging AI to transform security operations. Our focus on operational efficiencies, cost reduction, and improved quality of service is unwavering. We’re not just responding to the changing threat landscape – we’re reshaping it.

The future of MDR services is here, and it’s powered by the Rapid7 AI Engine.

AI and the Indian Election

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/06/ai-and-the-indian-election.html

As India concluded the world’s largest election on June 5, 2024, with over 640 million votes counted, observers could assess how the various parties and factions used artificial intelligence technologies—and what lessons that holds for the rest of the world.

The campaigns made extensive use of AI, including deepfake impersonations of candidates, celebrities and dead politicians. By some estimates, millions of Indian voters viewed deepfakes.

But, despite fears of widespread disinformation, for the most part the campaigns, candidates and activists used AI constructively in the election. They used AI for typical political activities, including mudslinging, but primarily to better connect with voters.

Deepfakes without the deception

Political parties in India spent an estimated US$50 million on authorized AI-generated content for targeted communication with their constituencies this election cycle. And it was largely successful.

Indian political strategists have long recognized the influence of personality and emotion on their constituents, and they started using AI to bolster their messaging. Young and upcoming AI companies like The Indian Deepfaker, which started out serving the entertainment industry, quickly responded to this growing demand for AI-generated campaign material.

In January, Muthuvel Karunanidhi, former chief minister of the southern state of Tamil Nadu for two decades, appeared via video at his party’s youth wing conference. He wore his signature yellow scarf, white shirt, dark glasses and had his familiar stance—head slightly bent sideways. But Karunanidhi died in 2018. His party authorized the deepfake.

In February, the All-India Anna Dravidian Progressive Federation party’s official X account posted an audio clip of Jayaram Jayalalithaa, the iconic superstar of Tamil politics colloquially called “Amma” or “Mother.” Jayalalithaa died in 2016.

Meanwhile, voters received calls from their local representatives to discuss local issues—except the leader on the other end of the phone was an AI impersonation. Bhartiya Janta Party (BJP) workers like Shakti Singh Rathore have been frequenting AI startups to send personalized videos to specific voters about the government benefits they received and asking for their vote over WhatsApp.

Multilingual boost

Deepfakes were not the only manifestation of AI in the Indian elections. Long before the election began, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressed a tightly packed crowd celebrating links between the state of Tamil Nadu in the south of India and the city of Varanasi in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh. Instructing his audience to put on earphones, Modi proudly announced the launch of his “new AI technology” as his Hindi speech was translated to Tamil in real time.

In a country with 22 official languages and almost 780 unofficial recorded languages, the BJP adopted AI tools to make Modi’s personality accessible to voters in regions where Hindi is not easily understood. Since 2022, Modi and his BJP have been using the AI-powered tool Bhashini, embedded in the NaMo mobile app, to translate Modi’s speeches with voiceovers in Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, Odia, Bengali, Marathi and Punjabi.

As part of their demos, some AI companies circulated their own viral versions of Modi’s famous monthly radio show “Mann Ki Baat,” which loosely translates to “From the Heart,” which they voice cloned to regional languages.

Adversarial uses

Indian political parties doubled down on online trolling, using AI to augment their ongoing meme wars. Early in the election season, the Indian National Congress released a short clip to its 6 million followers on Instagram, taking the title track from a new Hindi music album named “Chor” (thief). The video grafted Modi’s digital likeness onto the lead singer and cloned his voice with reworked lyrics critiquing his close ties to Indian business tycoons.

The BJP retaliated with its own video, on its 7-million-follower Instagram account, featuring a supercut of Modi campaigning on the streets, mixed with clips of his supporters but set to unique music. It was an old patriotic Hindi song sung by famous singer Mahendra Kapoor, who passed away in 2008 but was resurrected with AI voice cloning.

Modi himself quote-tweeted an AI-created video of him dancing—a common meme that alters footage of rapper Lil Yachty on stage—commenting “such creativity in peak poll season is truly a delight.”

In some cases, the violent rhetoric in Modi’s campaign that put Muslims at risk and incited violence was conveyed using generative AI tools, but the harm can be traced back to the hateful rhetoric itself and not necessarily the AI tools used to spread it.

The Indian experience

India is an early adopter, and the country’s experiments with AI serve as an illustration of what the rest of the world can expect in future elections. The technology’s ability to produce nonconsensual deepfakes of anyone can make it harder to tell truth from fiction, but its consensual uses are likely to make democracy more accessible.

The Indian election’s embrace of AI that began with entertainment, political meme wars, emotional appeals to people, resurrected politicians and persuasion through personalized phone calls to voters has opened a pathway for the role of AI in participatory democracy.

The surprise outcome of the election, with the BJP’s failure to win its predicted parliamentary majority, and India’s return to a deeply competitive political system especially highlights the possibility for AI to have a positive role in deliberative democracy and representative governance.

Lessons for the world’s democracies

It’s a goal of any political party or candidate in a democracy to have more targeted touch points with their constituents. The Indian elections have shown a unique attempt at using AI for more individualized communication across linguistically and ethnically diverse constituencies, and making their messages more accessible, especially to rural, low-income populations.

AI and the future of participatory democracy could make constituent communication not just personalized but also a dialogue, so voters can share their demands and experiences directly with their representatives—at speed and scale.

India can be an example of taking its recent fluency in AI-assisted party-to-people communications and moving it beyond politics. The government is already using these platforms to provide government services to citizens in their native languages.

If used safely and ethically, this technology could be an opportunity for a new era in representative governance, especially for the needs and experiences of people in rural areas to reach Parliament.

This essay was written with Vandinika Shukla and previously appeared in The Conversation.

Using AI for Political Polling

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/06/using-ai-for-political-polling.html

Public polling is a critical function of modern political campaigns and movements, but it isn’t what it once was. Recent US election cycles have produced copious postmortems explaining both the successes and the flaws of public polling. There are two main reasons polling fails.

First, nonresponse has skyrocketed. It’s radically harder to reach people than it used to be. Few people fill out surveys that come in the mail anymore. Few people answer their phone when a stranger calls. Pew Research reported that 36% of the people they called in 1997 would talk to them, but only 6% by 2018. Pollsters worldwide have faced similar challenges.

Second, people don’t always tell pollsters what they really think. Some hide their true thoughts because they are embarrassed about them. Others behave as a partisan, telling the pollster what they think their party wants them to say—or what they know the other party doesn’t want to hear.

Despite these frailties, obsessive interest in polling nonetheless consumes our politics. Headlines more likely tout the latest changes in polling numbers than the policy issues at stake in the campaign. This is a tragedy for a democracy. We should treat elections like choices that have consequences for our lives and well-being, not contests to decide who gets which cushy job.

Polling Machines?

AI could change polling. AI can offer the ability to instantaneously survey and summarize the expressed opinions of individuals and groups across the web, understand trends by demographic, and offer extrapolations to new circumstances and policy issues on par with human experts. The politicians of the (near) future won’t anxiously pester their pollsters for information about the results of a survey fielded last week: they’ll just ask a chatbot what people think. This will supercharge our access to realtime, granular information about public opinion, but at the same time it might also exacerbate concerns about the quality of this information.

I know it sounds impossible, but stick with us.

Large language models, the AI foundations behind tools like ChatGPT, are built on top of huge corpuses of data culled from the Internet. These are models trained to recapitulate what millions of real people have written in response to endless topics, contexts, and scenarios. For a decade or more, campaigns have trawled social media, looking for hints and glimmers of how people are reacting to the latest political news. This makes asking questions of an AI chatbot similar in spirit to doing analytics on social media, except that they are generative: you can ask them new questions that no one has ever posted about before, you can generate more data from populations too small to measure robustly, and you can immediately ask clarifying questions of your simulated constituents to better understand their reasoning

Researchers and firms are already using LLMs to simulate polling results. Current techniques are based on the ideas of AI agents. An AI agent is an instance of an AI model that has been conditioned to behave in a certain way. For example, it may be primed to respond as if it is a person with certain demographic characteristics and can access news articles from certain outlets. Researchers have set up populations of thousands of AI agents that respond as if they are individual members of a survey population, like humans on a panel that get called periodically to answer questions.

The big difference between humans and AI agents is that the AI agents always pick up the phone, so to speak, no matter how many times you contact them. A political candidate or strategist can ask an AI agent whether voters will support them if they take position A versus B, or tweaks of those options, like policy A-1 versus A-2. They can ask that question of male voters versus female voters. They can further limit the query to married male voters of retirement age in rural districts of Illinois without college degrees who lost a job during the last recession; the AI will integrate as much context as you ask.

What’s so powerful about this system is that it can generalize to new scenarios and survey topics, and spit out a plausible answer, even if its accuracy is not guaranteed. In many cases, it will anticipate those responses at least as well as a human political expert. And if the results don’t make sense, the human can immediately prompt the AI with a dozen follow-up questions.

Making AI agents better polling subjects

When we ran our own experiments in this kind of AI use case with the earliest versions of the model behind ChatGPT (GPT-3.5), we found that it did a fairly good job at replicating human survey responses. The ChatGPT agents tended to match the responses of their human counterparts fairly well across a variety of survey questions, such as support for abortion and approval of the US Supreme Court. The AI polling results had average responses, and distributions across demographic properties such as age and gender, similar to real human survey panels.

Our major systemic failure happened on a question about US intervention in the Ukraine war.  In our experiments, the AI agents conditioned to be liberal were predominantly opposed to US intervention in Ukraine and likened it to the Iraq war. Conservative AI agents gave hawkish responses supportive of US intervention. This is pretty much what most political experts would have expected of the political equilibrium in US foreign policy at the start of the decade but was exactly wrong in the politics of today.

This mistake has everything to do with timing. The humans were asked the question after Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, whereas the AI model was trained using data that only covered events through September 2021. The AI got it wrong because it didn’t know how the politics had changed. The model lacked sufficient context on crucially relevant recent events.

We believe AI agents can overcome these shortcomings. While AI models are dependent on  the data they are trained with, and all the limitations inherent in that, what makes AI agents special is that they can automatically source and incorporate new data at the time they are asked a question. AI models can update the context in which they generate opinions by learning from the same sources that humans do. Each AI agent in a simulated panel can be exposed to the same social and media news sources as humans from that same demographic before they respond to a survey question. This works because AI agents can follow multi-step processes, such as reading a question, querying a defined database of information (such as Google, or the New York Times, or Fox News, or Reddit), and then answering a question.

In this way, AI polling tools can simulate exposing their synthetic survey panel to whatever news is most relevant to a topic and likely to emerge in each AI agent’s own echo chamber. And they can query for other relevant contextual information, such as demographic trends and historical data. Like human pollsters, they can try to refine their expectations on the basis of factors like how expensive homes are in a respondent’s neighborhood, or how many people in that district turned out to vote last cycle.

Likely use cases for AI polling

AI polling will be irresistible to campaigns, and to the media. But research is already revealing when and where this tool will fail. While AI polling will always have limitations in accuracy, that makes them similar to, not different from, traditional polling. Today’s pollsters are challenged to reach sample sizes large enough to measure statistically significant differences between similar populations, and the issues of nonresponse and inauthentic response can make them systematically wrong. Yet for all those shortcomings, both traditional and AI-based polls will still be useful. For all the hand-wringing and consternation over the accuracy of US political polling, national issue surveys still tend to be accurate to within a few percentage points. If you’re running for a town council seat or in a neck-and-neck national election, or just trying to make the right policy decision within a local government, you might care a lot about those small and localized differences. But if you’re looking to track directional changes over time, or differences between demographic groups, or to uncover insights about who responds best to what message, then these imperfect signals are sufficient to help campaigns and policymakers.

Where AI will work best is as an augmentation of more traditional human polls. Over time, AI tools will get better at anticipating human responses, and also at knowing when they will be most wrong or uncertain. They will recognize which issues and human communities are in the most flux, where the model’s training data is liable to steer it in the wrong direction. In those cases, AI models can send up a white flag and indicate that they need to engage human respondents to calibrate to real people’s perspectives. The AI agents can even be programmed to automate this. They can use existing survey tools—with all their limitations and latency—to query for authentic human responses when they need them.

This kind of human-AI polling chimera lands us, funnily enough, not too distant from where survey research is today. Decades of social science research has led to substantial innovations in statistical methodologies for analyzing survey data. Current polling methods already do substantial modeling and projecting to predictively model properties of a general population based on sparse survey samples. Today, humans fill out the surveys and computers fill in the gaps. In the future, it will be the opposite: AI will fill out the survey and, when the AI isn’t sure what box to check, humans will fill the gaps. So if you’re not comfortable with the idea that political leaders will turn to a machine to get intelligence about which candidates and policies you want, then you should have about as many misgivings about the present as you will the future.

And while the AI results could improve quickly, they probably won’t be seen as credible for some time. Directly asking people what they think feels more reliable than asking a computer what people think. We expect these AI-assisted polls will be initially used internally by campaigns, with news organizations relying on more traditional techniques. It will take a major election where AI is right and humans are wrong to change that.

This essay was written with Aaron Berger, Eric Gong, and Nathan Sanders, and previously appeared on the Harvard Kennedy School Ash Center’s website.

LLMs Acting Deceptively

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/06/llms-acting-deceptively.html

New research: “Deception abilities emerged in large language models“:

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are currently at the forefront of intertwining AI systems with human communication and everyday life. Thus, aligning them with human values is of great importance. However, given the steady increase in reasoning abilities, future LLMs are under suspicion of becoming able to deceive human operators and utilizing this ability to bypass monitoring efforts. As a prerequisite to this, LLMs need to possess a conceptual understanding of deception strategies. This study reveals that such strategies emerged in state-of-the-art LLMs, but were nonexistent in earlier LLMs. We conduct a series of experiments showing that state-of-the-art LLMs are able to understand and induce false beliefs in other agents, that their performance in complex deception scenarios can be amplified utilizing chain-of-thought reasoning, and that eliciting Machiavellianism in LLMs can trigger misaligned deceptive behavior. GPT-4, for instance, exhibits deceptive behavior in simple test scenarios 99.16% of the time (P < 0.001). In complex second-order deception test scenarios where the aim is to mislead someone who expects to be deceived, GPT-4 resorts to deceptive behavior 71.46% of the time (P < 0.001) when augmented with chain-of-thought reasoning. In sum, revealing hitherto unknown machine behavior in LLMs, our study contributes to the nascent field of machine psychology.

Securing AI Development in the Cloud: Navigating the Risks and Opportunities

Post Syndicated from Rapid7 original https://blog.rapid7.com/2024/06/05/securing-ai-development-in-the-cloud-navigating-the-risks-and-opportunities/

AI-TRiSM – Trust, Risk and Security Management in the Age of AI

Securing AI Development in the Cloud: Navigating the Risks and Opportunities

Co-authored by Lara Sunday and Pojan Shahrivar

As artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies continue to advance and proliferate, organizations across industries are investing heavily in these transformative capabilities. According to Gartner, by 2027, spending on AI software will grow to $297.9 billion at a compound annual growth rate of 19.1%. Generative AI (GenAI) software spend will rise from 8% of AI software in 2023 to 35% by 2027.

With the promise of enhanced efficiency, personalization, and innovation, organizations are increasingly turning to cloud environments to develop and deploy these powerful AI and ML technologies. However, this rapid innovation also introduces new security risks and challenges that must be addressed proactively to protect valuable data, intellectual property, and maintain the trust of customers and stakeholders.

Benefits of Cloud Environments for AI Development

Cloud platforms offer unparalleled scalability, allowing organizations to easily scale their computing resources up or down to meet the demanding requirements of training and deploying complex AI models.

“The ability to spin up and down resources on-demand has been a game-changer for our AI development efforts,” says Stuart Millar, Principal AI Engineer at Rapid7. “We can quickly provision the necessary compute power during peak training periods, then scale back down to optimize costs when those resources are no longer needed.”

Cloud environments also provide a cost-effective way to develop AI models, with usage-based pricing models that avoid large upfront investments in hardware and infrastructure. Additionally, major cloud providers offer access to cutting-edge AI hardware and pre-built tools and services, such as Amazon SageMaker, Azure Machine Learning, and Google Cloud AI Platform, which can accelerate development and deployment cycles.

Challenges and Risks of Cloud-Based AI Development

While the cloud offers numerous advantages for AI development, it also introduces unique challenges that organizations must navigate. Limited visibility into complex data flows and model updates can create blind spots for security teams, leaving them unable to effectively monitor for potential threats or anomalies.

In their  AI Threat Landscape Report, HiddenLayer highlighted that 98% of all the companies surveyed identified that elements of their AI models were crucial to their business success, and 77% identified breaches to their AI in the past year. Additionally, multi-cloud and hybrid deployments bring monitoring, governance, and reporting challenges, making it difficult to assess AI/ML risk in context across different cloud environments.

New Attack Vectors and Risk Types

Developing AI in the cloud also exposes organizations to new attack vectors and risk types that traditional security tools may not be equipped to detect or mitigate. Some examples include:

Prompt Injection (LLM01): Imagine a large language model used for generating marketing copy. An attacker could craft a special prompt that tricks the model into generating harmful or offensive content, damaging the company’s brand and reputation.

Training Data Poisoning (LLM03, ML02): Adversaries can tamper with training data to compromise the integrity and reliability of cloud-based AI models. In the case of an AI model used for image recognition in a security surveillance system, poisoned training data containing mislabeled images could cause the model to generate incorrect classifications, potentially missing critical threats.

Model Theft (LLM10, ML05): Unauthorized access to proprietary AI models deployed in the cloud poses risks to intellectual property and competitive advantage. If a competitor were to steal a model trained on a company’s sensitive data, they could potentially replicate its functionality and gain valuable insights.

Supply Chain Vulnerabilities (LLM05, ML06): Compromised libraries, datasets, or services used in cloud AI development pipelines can lead to widespread security breaches. A malicious actor might introduce a vulnerability into a widely used open-source library for AI, which could then be exploited to gain access to AI models deployed by multiple organizations.

Developing Best Practices for Securing AI Development

To address these challenges and risks, organizations need to develop and implement best practices and standards tailored to their specific business needs, striking the right balance between enabling innovation and introducing risk.

While guidelines like NCSC Secure AI System Development and The Open Standard for Responsible AI provide a valuable starting point, organizations must also develop their own customized best practices that align with their unique business requirements, risk appetite, and AI/ML use cases. For instance, a financial institution developing AI models for fraud detection might prioritize best practices around data governance and model explainability to ensure compliance with regulations and maintain transparency in decision-making processes.

Key considerations when developing these best practices include:

Ensuring secure data handling and governance throughout the AI lifecycle

  • Implementing robust access controls and identity management for AI/ML resources
  • Validating and monitoring AI models for potential biases, vulnerabilities, or anomalies
  • Establishing incident response and remediation processes for AI-specific threats
  • Maintaining transparency and explainability to understand and audit AI model behavior

Rapid7’s Approach to Securing AI Development

“At Rapid7, our InsightCloudSec solution offers real-time visibility into AI/ML resources running across major cloud providers, allowing security teams to continuously monitor for potential risks or misconfigurations,” says Aniket Menon, VP, Product Management. “Visibility is the foundation for effective security in any environment, and that’s especially true in the complex world of AI development. Without a clear view into your AI/ML assets and activities, you’re essentially operating blind, leaving your organization vulnerable to a range of threats.”

Here at Rapid7 our AI TRiSM (Trust, Risk, and Security Management) framework empowers our teams. The framework provides us with confidence not only in our operations but also in driving innovation. In their recent blog outlining the company’s AI principles, Laura Ellis and Sabeen Malik shared how Rapid7 tackles and addresses AI challenges. Centering on transparency, fairness, safety, security, privacy, and accountability, these principles are not just guidelines; they are integral to how Rapid7 builds, deploys, and manages AI systems.

Security and compliance are two key InsightCloudSec capabilities. Compliance Packs are out-of-the-box collections of related Insights focused on industry requirements and standards for all of your resources. Compliance packs may focus on security, costs, governance, or combinations of these across a variety of frameworks, e.g., HIPAA, PCI DSS, GDPR, etc.

Last year Rapid7 launched the Rapid7 AI/ML Security Best Practices compliance pack, the pack allows for real-time and continuous visibility into AI/ML resources running across your clouds with support for GenAI services across AWS, Azure and GCP. To empower you to assess this data in the context of your organizational requirements and priorities, you can then automatically prioritize AI/ML-related risk with Layered Context based on exploitability and potential business impact.

You can also leverage Identity Analysis in InsightCloudSec to collect and present the actions executed by a given user or role within a certain time period. These logged actions are collected and analyzed, providing you with a view across your organization of who can access AI/ML resources and automatically rightsize in accordance with the least privilege access (LPA) concept. This enables you to strategically inform your policies moving forward. Native automation allows you to then act on your assessments to alert on compliance drift, remediate AI/ML risk, and enact prevention mechanisms.

Rapid7’s Continued Dedication to AI Innovation

As an inaugural signer of the CISA Secure by Design Pledge, and through our partnership with Queen’s University Belfast Centre for Secure Information Technologies (CSIT), Rapid7 remains dedicated to collaborating with industry leaders and academic institutions to stay ahead of emerging threats and develop cutting-edge solutions for securing AI development.

As the adoption of AI and ML capabilities continues to accelerate, it’s imperative that organizations have the knowledge and tools to make informed decisions and build with confidence. By implementing robust best practices and leveraging advanced security tools like InsightCloudSec, organizations can harness the power of AI while mitigating the associated risks and ensuring their valuable data and intellectual property remain protected.

To learn more about how Rapid7 can help your organization develop and implement best practices for securing AI development, visit our website to request a demo.

Gartner, Forecast Analysis: Artificial Intelligence Software, 2023-2027, Worldwide, Alys Woodward, et al, 07 November 2023

Online Privacy and Overfishing

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/06/online-privacy-and-overfishing.html

Microsoft recently caught state-backed hackers using its generative AI tools to help with their attacks. In the security community, the immediate questions weren’t about how hackers were using the tools (that was utterly predictable), but about how Microsoft figured it out. The natural conclusion was that Microsoft was spying on its AI users, looking for harmful hackers at work.

Some pushed back at characterizing Microsoft’s actions as “spying.” Of course cloud service providers monitor what users are doing. And because we expect Microsoft to be doing something like this, it’s not fair to call it spying.

We see this argument as an example of our shifting collective expectations of privacy. To understand what’s happening, we can learn from an unlikely source: fish.

In the mid-20th century, scientists began noticing that the number of fish in the ocean—so vast as to underlie the phrase “There are plenty of fish in the sea”—had started declining rapidly due to overfishing. They had already seen a similar decline in whale populations, when the post-WWII whaling industry nearly drove many species extinct. In whaling and later in commercial fishing, new technology made it easier to find and catch marine creatures in ever greater numbers. Ecologists, specifically those working in fisheries management, began studying how and when certain fish populations had gone into serious decline.

One scientist, Daniel Pauly, realized that researchers studying fish populations were making a major error when trying to determine acceptable catch size. It wasn’t that scientists didn’t recognize the declining fish populations. It was just that they didn’t realize how significant the decline was. Pauly noted that each generation of scientists had a different baseline to which they compared the current statistics, and that each generation’s baseline was lower than that of the previous one.

What seems normal to us in the security community is whatever was commonplace at the beginning of our careers.

Pauly called this “shifting baseline syndrome” in a 1995 paper. The baseline most scientists used was the one that was normal when they began their research careers. By that measure, each subsequent decline wasn’t significant, but the cumulative decline was devastating. Each generation of researchers came of age in a new ecological and technological environment, inadvertently masking an exponential decline.

Pauly’s insights came too late to help those managing some fisheries. The ocean suffered catastrophes such as the complete collapse of the Northwest Atlantic cod population in the 1990s.

Internet surveillance, and the resultant loss of privacy, is following the same trajectory. Just as certain fish populations in the world’s oceans have fallen 80 percent, from previously having fallen 80 percent, from previously having fallen 80 percent (ad infinitum), our expectations of privacy have similarly fallen precipitously. The pervasive nature of modern technology makes surveillance easier than ever before, while each successive generation of the public is accustomed to the privacy status quo of their youth. What seems normal to us in the security community is whatever was commonplace at the beginning of our careers.

Historically, people controlled their computers, and software was standalone. The always-connected cloud-deployment model of software and services flipped the script. Most apps and services are designed to be always-online, feeding usage information back to the company. A consequence of this modern deployment model is that everyone—cynical tech folks and even ordinary users—expects that what you do with modern tech isn’t private. But that’s because the baseline has shifted.

AI chatbots are the latest incarnation of this phenomenon: They produce output in response to your input, but behind the scenes there’s a complex cloud-based system keeping track of that input—both to improve the service and to sell you ads.

Shifting baselines are at the heart of our collective loss of privacy. The U.S. Supreme Court has long held that our right to privacy depends on whether we have a reasonable expectation of privacy. But expectation is a slippery thing: It’s subject to shifting baselines.

The question remains: What now? Fisheries scientists, armed with knowledge of shifting-baseline syndrome, now look at the big picture. They no longer consider relative measures, such as comparing this decade with the last decade. Instead, they take a holistic, ecosystem-wide perspective to see what a healthy marine ecosystem and thus sustainable catch should look like. They then turn these scientifically derived sustainable-catch figures into limits to be codified by regulators.

In privacy and security, we need to do the same. Instead of comparing to a shifting baseline, we need to step back and look at what a healthy technological ecosystem would look like: one that respects people’s privacy rights while also allowing companies to recoup costs for services they provide. Ultimately, as with fisheries, we need to take a big-picture perspective and be aware of shifting baselines. A scientifically informed and democratic regulatory process is required to preserve a heritage—whether it be the ocean or the Internet—for the next generation.

This essay was written with Barath Raghavan, and previously appeared in IEEE Spectrum.

AI Will Increase the Quantity—and Quality—of Phishing Scams

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/06/ai-will-increase-the-quantity-and-quality-of-phishing-scams.html

A piece I coauthored with Fredrik Heiding and Arun Vishwanath in the Harvard Business Review:

Summary. Gen AI tools are rapidly making these emails more advanced, harder to spot, and significantly more dangerous. Recent research showed that 60% of participants fell victim to artificial intelligence (AI)-automated phishing, which is comparable to the success rates of non-AI-phishing messages created by human experts. Companies need to: 1) understand the asymmetrical capabilities of AI-enhanced phishing, 2) determine the company or division’s phishing threat severity level, and 3) confirm their current phishing awareness routines.

Here’s the full text.

How AI Will Change Democracy

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/05/how-ai-will-change-democracy.html

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to predict that artificial intelligence will affect every aspect of our society. Not by doing new things. But mostly by doing things that are already being done by humans, perfectly competently.

Replacing humans with AIs isn’t necessarily interesting. But when an AI takes over a human task, the task changes.

In particular, there are potential changes over four dimensions: Speed, scale, scope and sophistication. The problem with AIs trading stocks isn’t that they’re better than humans—it’s that they’re faster. But computers are better at chess and Go because they use more sophisticated strategies than humans. We’re worried about AI-controlled social media accounts because they operate on a superhuman scale.

It gets interesting when changes in degree can become changes in kind. High-speed trading is fundamentally different than regular human trading. AIs have invented fundamentally new strategies in the game of Go. Millions of AI-controlled social media accounts could fundamentally change the nature of propaganda.

It’s these sorts of changes and how AI will affect democracy that I want to talk about.

To start, I want to list some of AI’s core competences. First, it is really good as a summarizer. Second, AI is good at explaining things, teaching with infinite patience. Third, and related, AI can persuade. Propaganda is an offshoot of this. Fourth, AI is fundamentally a prediction technology. Predictions about whether turning left or right will get you to your destination faster. Predictions about whether a tumor is cancerous might improve medical diagnoses. Predictions about which word is likely to come next can help compose an email. Fifth, AI can assess. Assessing requires outside context and criteria. AI is less good at assessing, but it’s getting better. Sixth, AI can decide. A decision is a prediction plus an assessment. We are already using AI to make all sorts of decisions.

How these competences translate to actual useful AI systems depends a lot on the details. We don’t know how far AI will go in replicating or replacing human cognitive functions. Or how soon that will happen. In constrained environments it can be easy. AIs already play chess and Go better than humans. Unconstrained environments are harder. There are still significant challenges to fully AI-piloted automobiles. The technologist Jaron Lanier has a nice quote, that AI does best when “human activities have been done many times before, but not in exactly the same way.”

In this talk, I am going to be largely optimistic about the technology. I’m not going to dwell on the details of how the AI systems might work. Much of what I am talking about is still in the future. Science fiction, but not unrealistic science fiction.

Where I am going to be less optimistic—and more realistic—is about the social implications of the technology. Again, I am less interested in how AI will substitute for humans. I’m looking more at the second-order effects of those substitutions: How the underlying systems will change because of changes in speed, scale, scope and sophistication. My goal is to imagine the possibilities. So that we might be prepared for their eventuality.

And as I go through the possibilities, keep in mind a few questions: Will the change distribute or consolidate power? Will it make people more or less personally involved in democracy? What needs to happen before people will trust AI in this context? What could go wrong if a bad actor subverted the AI in this context? And what can we do, as security technologists, to help?

I am thinking about democracy very broadly. Not just representations, or elections. Democracy as a system for distributing decisions evenly across a population. It’s a way of converting individual preferences into group decisions. And that includes bureaucratic decisions.

To that end, I want to discuss five different areas where AI will affect democracy: Politics, lawmaking, administration, the legal system and, finally, citizens themselves.

I: AI-assisted politicians

I’ve already said that AIs are good at persuasion. Politicians will make use of that. Pretty much everyone talks about AI propaganda. Politicians will make use of that, too. But let’s talk about how this might go well.

In the past, candidates would write books and give speeches to connect with voters. In the future, candidates will also use personalized chatbots to directly engage with voters on a variety of issues. AI can also help fundraise. I don’t have to explain the persuasive power of individually crafted appeals. AI can conduct polls. There’s some really interesting work into having large language models assume different personas and answer questions from their points of view. Unlike people, AIs are always available, will answer thousands of questions without getting tired or bored and are more reliable. This won’t replace polls, but it can augment them. AI can assist human campaign managers by coordinating campaign workers, creating talking points, doing media outreach and assisting get-out-the-vote efforts. These are all things that humans already do. So there’s no real news there.

The changes are largely in scale. AIs can engage with voters, conduct polls and fundraise at a scale that humans cannot—for all sizes of elections. They can also assist in lobbying strategies. AIs could also potentially develop more sophisticated campaign and political strategies than humans can. I expect an arms race as politicians start using these sorts of tools. And we don’t know if the tools will favor one political ideology over another.

More interestingly, future politicians will largely be AI-driven. I don’t mean that AI will replace humans as politicians. Absent a major cultural shift—and some serious changes in the law—that won’t happen. But as AI starts to look and feel more human, our human politicians will start to look and feel more like AI. I think we will be OK with it, because it’s a path we’ve been walking down for a long time. Any major politician today is just the public face of a complex socio-technical system. When the president makes a speech, we all know that they didn’t write it. When a legislator sends out a campaign email, we know that they didn’t write that either—even if they signed it. And when we get a holiday card from any of these people, we know that it was signed by an autopen. Those things are so much a part of politics today that we don’t even think about it. In the future, we’ll accept that almost all communications from our leaders will be written by AI. We’ll accept that they use AI tools for making political and policy decisions. And for planning their campaigns. And for everything else they do. None of this is necessarily bad. But it does change the nature of politics and politicians—just like television and the internet did.

II: AI-assisted legislators

AIs are already good at summarization. This can be applied to listening to constituents:  summarizing letters, comments and making sense of constituent inputs. Public meetings might be summarized. Here the scale of the problem is already overwhelming, and AI can make a big difference. Beyond summarizing, AI can highlight interesting arguments or detect bulk letter-writing campaigns. They can aid in political negotiating.

AIs can also write laws. In November 2023, Porto Alegre, Brazil became the first city to enact a law that was entirely written by AI. It had to do with water meters. One of the councilmen prompted ChatGPT, and it produced a complete bill. He submitted it to the legislature without telling anyone who wrote it. And the humans passed it without any changes.

A law is just a piece of generated text that a government agrees to adopt. And as with every other profession, policymakers will turn to AI to help them draft and revise text. Also, AI can take human-written laws and figure out what they actually mean. Lots of laws are recursive, referencing paragraphs and words of other laws. AIs are already good at making sense of all that.

This means that AI will be good at finding legal loopholes—or at creating legal loopholes. I wrote about this in my latest book, A Hacker’s Mind. Finding loopholes is similar to finding vulnerabilities in software. There’s also a concept called “micro-legislation.” That’s the smallest unit of law that makes a difference to someone. It could be a word or a punctuation mark. AIs will be good at inserting micro-legislation into larger bills. More positively, AI can help figure out unintended consequences of a policy change—by simulating how the change interacts with all the other laws and with human behavior.

AI can also write more complex law than humans can. Right now, laws tend to be general. With details to be worked out by a government agency. AI can allow legislators to propose, and then vote on, all of those details. That will change the balance of power between the legislative and the executive branches of government. This is less of an issue when the same party controls the executive and the legislative branches. It is a big deal when those branches of government are in the hands of different parties. The worry is that AI will give the most powerful groups more tools for propagating their interests.

AI can write laws that are impossible for humans to understand. There are two kinds of laws: specific laws, like speed limits, and laws that require judgment, like those that address reckless driving. Imagine that we train an AI on lots of street camera footage to recognize reckless driving and that it gets better than humans at identifying the sort of behavior that tends to result in accidents. And because it has real-time access to cameras everywhere, it can spot it … everywhere. The AI won’t be able to explain its criteria: It would be a black-box neural net. But we could pass a law defining reckless driving by what that AI says. It would be a law that no human could ever understand. This could happen in all sorts of areas where judgment is part of defining what is illegal. We could delegate many things to the AI because of speed and scale. Market manipulation. Medical malpractice. False advertising. I don’t know if humans will accept this.

III: AI-assisted bureaucracy

Generative AI is already good at a whole lot of administrative paperwork tasks. It will only get better. I want to focus on a few places where it will make a big difference. It could aid in benefits administration—figuring out who is eligible for what. Humans do this today, but there is often a backlog because there aren’t enough humans. It could audit contracts. It could operate at scale, auditing all human-negotiated government contracts. It could aid in contracts negotiation. The government buys a lot of things and has all sorts of complicated rules. AI could help government contractors navigate those rules.

More generally, it could aid in negotiations of all kinds. Think of it as a strategic adviser. This is no different than a human but could result in more complex negotiations. Human negotiations generally center around only a few issues. Mostly because that’s what humans can keep in mind. AI versus AI negotiations could potentially involve thousands of variables simultaneously. Imagine we are using an AI to aid in some international trade negotiation and it suggests a complex strategy that is beyond human understanding. Will we blindly follow the AI? Will we be more willing to do so once we have some history with its accuracy?

And one last bureaucratic possibility: Could AI come up with better institutional designs than we have today? And would we implement them?

IV: AI-assisted legal system

When referring to an AI-assisted legal system, I mean this very broadly—both lawyering and judging and all the things surrounding those activities.

AIs can be lawyers. Early attempts at having AIs write legal briefs didn’t go well. But this is already changing as the systems get more accurate. Chatbots are now able to properly cite their sources and minimize errors. Future AIs will be much better at writing legalese, drastically reducing the cost of legal counsel. And there’s every indication that it will be able to do much of the routine work that lawyers do. So let’s talk about what this means.

Most obviously, it reduces the cost of legal advice and representation, giving it to people who currently can’t afford it. An AI public defender is going to be a lot better than an overworked not very good human public defender. But if we assume that human-plus-AI beats AI-only, then the rich get the combination, and the poor are stuck with just the AI.

It also will result in more sophisticated legal arguments. AI’s ability to search all of the law for precedents to bolster a case will be transformative.

AI will also change the meaning of a lawsuit. Right now, suing someone acts as a strong social signal because of the cost. If the cost drops to free, that signal will be lost. And orders of magnitude more lawsuits will be filed, which will overwhelm the court system.

Another effect could be gutting the profession. Lawyering is based on apprenticeship. But if most of the apprentice slots are filled by AIs, where do newly minted attorneys go to get training? And then where do the top human lawyers come from? This might not happen. AI-assisted lawyers might result in more human lawyering. We don’t know yet.

AI can help enforce the law. In a sense, this is nothing new. Automated systems already act as law enforcement—think speed trap cameras and Breathalyzers. But AI can take this kind of thing much further, like automatically identifying people who cheat on tax returns, identifying fraud on government service applications and watching all of the traffic cameras and issuing citations.

Again, the AI is performing a task for which we don’t have enough humans. And doing it faster, and at scale. This has the obvious problem of false positives. Which could be hard to contest if the courts believe that the computer is always right. This is a thing today: If a Breathalyzer says you’re drunk, it can be hard to contest the software in court. And also the problem of bias, of course: AI law enforcers may be more and less equitable than their human predecessors.

But most importantly, AI changes our relationship with the law. Everyone commits driving violations all the time. If we had a system of automatic enforcement, the way we all drive would change—significantly. Not everyone wants this future. Lots of people don’t want to fund the IRS, even though catching tax cheats is incredibly profitable for the government. And there are legitimate concerns as to whether this would be applied equitably.

AI can help enforce regulations. We have no shortage of rules and regulations. What we have is a shortage of time, resources and willpower to enforce them, which means that lots of companies know that they can ignore regulations with impunity. AI can change this by decoupling the ability to enforce rules from the resources necessary to do it. This makes enforcement more scalable and efficient. Imagine putting cameras in every slaughterhouse in the country looking for animal welfare violations or fielding an AI in every warehouse camera looking for labor violations. That could create an enormous shift in the balance of power between government and corporations—which means that it will be strongly resisted by corporate power.

AIs can provide expert opinions in court. Imagine an AI trained on millions of traffic accidents, including video footage, telemetry from cars and previous court cases. The AI could provide the court with a reconstruction of the accident along with an assignment of fault. AI could do this in a lot of cases where there aren’t enough human experts to analyze the data—and would do it better, because it would have more experience.

AIs can also perform judging tasks, weighing evidence and making decisions, probably not in actual courtrooms, at least not anytime soon, but in other contexts. There are many areas of government where we don’t have enough adjudicators. Automated adjudication has the potential to offer everyone immediate justice. Maybe the AI does the first level of adjudication and humans handle appeals. Probably the first place we’ll see this is in contracts. Instead of the parties agreeing to binding arbitration to resolve disputes, they’ll agree to binding arbitration by AI. This would significantly decrease cost of arbitration. Which would probably significantly increase the number of disputes.

So, let’s imagine a world where dispute resolution is both cheap and fast. If you and I are business partners, and we have a disagreement, we can get a ruling in minutes. And we can do it as many times as we want—multiple times a day, even. Will we lose the ability to disagree and then resolve our disagreements on our own? Or will this make it easier for us to be in a partnership and trust each other?

V: AI-assisted citizens

AI can help people understand political issues by explaining them. We can imagine both partisan and nonpartisan chatbots. AI can also provide political analysis and commentary. And it can do this at every scale. Including for local elections that simply aren’t important enough to attract human journalists. There is a lot of research going on right now on AI as moderator, facilitator, and consensus builder. Human moderators are still better, but we don’t have enough human moderators. And AI will improve over time. AI can moderate at scale, giving the capability to every decision-making group—or chatroom—or local government meeting.

AI can act as a government watchdog. Right now, much local government effectively happens in secret because there are no local journalists covering public meetings. AI can change that, providing summaries and flagging changes in position.

AIs can help people navigate bureaucracies by filling out forms, applying for services and contesting bureaucratic actions. This would help people get the services they deserve, especially disadvantaged people who have difficulty navigating these systems. Again, this is a task that we don’t have enough qualified humans to perform. It sounds good, but not everyone wants this. Administrative burdens can be deliberate.

Finally, AI can eliminate the need for politicians. This one is further out there, but bear with me. Already there is research showing AI can extrapolate our political preferences. An AI personal assistant trained on and continuously attuned to your political preferences could advise you, including what to support and who to vote for. It could possibly even vote on your behalf or, more interestingly, act as your personal representative.

This is where it gets interesting. Our system of representative democracy empowers elected officials to stand in for our collective preferences. But that has obvious problems. Representatives are necessary because people don’t pay attention to politics. And even if they did, there isn’t enough room in the debate hall for everyone to fit. So we need to pick one of us to pass laws in our name. But that selection process is incredibly inefficient. We have complex policy wants and beliefs and can make complex trade-offs. The space of possible policy outcomes is equally complex. But we can’t directly debate the policies. We can only choose one of two—or maybe a few more—candidates to do that for us. This has been called democracy’s “lossy bottleneck.” AI can change this. We can imagine a personal AI directly participating in policy debates on our behalf along with millions of other personal AIs and coming to a consensus on policy.

More near term, AIs can result in more ballot initiatives. Instead of five or six, there might be five or six hundred, as long as the AI can reliably advise people on how to vote. It’s hard to know whether this is a good thing. I don’t think we want people to become politically passive because the AI is taking care of it. But it could result in more legislation that the majority actually wants.

Where will AI take us?

That’s my list. Again, watch where changes of degree result in changes in kind. The sophistication of AI lawmaking will mean more detailed laws, which will change the balance of power between the executive and the legislative branches. The scale of AI lawyering means that litigation becomes affordable to everyone, which will mean an explosion in the amount of litigation. The speed of AI adjudication means that contract disputes will get resolved much faster, which will change the nature of settlements. The scope of AI enforcement means that some laws will become impossible to evade, which will change how the rich and powerful think about them.

I think this is all coming. The time frame is hazy, but the technology is moving in these directions.

All of these applications need security of one form or another. Can we provide confidentiality, integrity and availability where it is needed? AIs are just computers. As such, they have all the security problems regular computers have—plus the new security risks stemming from AI and the way it is trained, deployed and used. Like everything else in security, it depends on the details.

First, the incentives matter. In some cases, the user of the AI wants it to be both secure and accurate. In some cases, the user of the AI wants to subvert the system. Think about prompt injection attacks. In most cases, the owners of the AIs aren’t the users of the AI. As happened with search engines and social media, surveillance and advertising are likely to become the AI’s business model. And in some cases, what the user of the AI wants is at odds with what society wants.

Second, the risks matter. The cost of getting things wrong depends a lot on the application. If a candidate’s chatbot suggests a ridiculous policy, that’s easily corrected. If an AI is helping someone fill out their immigration paperwork, a mistake can get them deported. We need to understand the rate of AI mistakes versus the rate of human mistakes—and also realize that AI mistakes are viewed differently than human mistakes. There are also different types of mistakes: false positives versus false negatives. But also, AI systems can make different kinds of mistakes than humans do—and that’s important. In every case, the systems need to be able to correct mistakes, especially in the context of democracy.

Many of the applications are in adversarial environments. If two countries are using AI to assist in trade negotiations, they are both going to try to hack each other’s AIs. This will include attacks against the AI models but also conventional attacks against the computers and networks that are running the AIs. They’re going to want to subvert, eavesdrop on or disrupt the other’s AI.

Some AI applications will need to run in secure environments. Large language models work best when they have access to everything, in order to train. That goes against traditional classification rules about compartmentalization.

Fourth, power matters. AI is a technology that fundamentally magnifies power of the humans who use it, but not equally across users or applications. Can we build systems that reduce power imbalances rather than increase them? Think of the privacy versus surveillance debate in the context of AI.

And similarly, equity matters. Human agency matters.

And finally, trust matters. Whether or not to trust an AI is less about the AI and more about the application. Some of these AI applications are individual. Some of these applications are societal. Whether something like “fairness” matters depends on this. And there are many competing definitions of fairness that depend on the details of the system and the application. It’s the same with transparency. The need for it depends on the application and the incentives. Democratic applications are likely to require more transparency than corporate ones and probably AI models that are not owned and run by global tech monopolies.

All of these security issues are bigger than AI or democracy. Like all of our security experience, applying it to these new systems will require some new thinking.

AI will be one of humanity’s most important inventions. That’s probably true. What we don’t know is if this is the moment we are inventing it. Or if today’s systems are yet more over-hyped technologies. But these are security conversations we are going to need to have eventually.

AI is fundamentally a power-enhancing technology. We need to ensure that it distributes power and doesn’t further concentrate it.

AI is coming for democracy. Whether the changes are a net positive or negative depends on us. Let’s help tilt things to the positive.

This essay is adapted from a keynote speech delivered at the RSA Conference in San Francisco on May 7, 2024. It originally appeared in Cyberscoop.

 

Let’s Architect! Learn About Machine Learning on AWS

Post Syndicated from Luca Mezzalira original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/lets-architect-learn-about-machine-learning-on-aws/

A data-driven approach empowers businesses to make informed decisions based on accurate predictions and forecasts, leading to improved operational efficiency and resource optimization. Machine learning (ML) systems have the remarkable ability to continuously learn and adapt, improving their performance over time as they are exposed to more data. This self-learning capability ensures that organizations can stay ahead of the curve, responding dynamically to changing market conditions and customer preferences, ultimately driving innovation and enhancing competitiveness.

By leveraging the power of machine learning on AWS, businesses can unlock benefits that enhance efficiency, improve decision-making, and foster growth.

AWS re:Invent 2023 – Zero to machine learning: Jump-start your data-driven journey

In this session, see how organizations with constrained resources (budgets, skill gaps, time) can jump start their data-driven journey with advanced analytics and ML capabilities. Learn AWS Working Backwards best practices to drive forward data-related projects that address tangible business value. Then dive into AWS analytics and AI/ML capabilities that simplify and expedite data pipeline delivery and business value from ML workloads. Hear about low-code no-code (LCNC) AWS services within the context of a complete data pipeline architecture.

Take me to this video

See an architecture to analyze customer churn using AWS services

Figure 1. See an architecture to analyze customer churn using AWS services

Introduction to MLOps engineering on AWS

As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to revolutionize industries, the ability to operationalize and scale ML models has become a critical challenge. This session introduces the concept of MLOps, a discipline that builds upon and extends the widely adopted DevOps practices prevalent in software development. By applying MLOps principles, organizations can streamline the process of building, training, and deploying ML models, ensuring efficient and reliable model lifecycle management. By mastering MLOps, organizations can bridge the gap between AI development and operations, enabling them to unlock the full potential of their ML initiatives.

Take me to this video

MLOps maturity level will help to assess your organization and understand how to reach the next level.

Figure 2. MLOps maturity level will help to assess your organization and understand how to reach the next level.

Behind-the-scenes look at generative AI infrastructure at Amazon

To power generative AI applications while keeping costs under control, AWS designs and builds machine learning accelerators like AWS Trainium and AWS Inferentia. This session introduces purpose-built ML hardware for model training and inference, and shows how Amazon and AWS customers take advantage of those solutions to optimize costs and reduce latency.

You can learn from practical examples showing the impact of those solutions and explanations about how these chips work. ML accelerators are not only beneficial for generative AI workloads; they can also be applied to other use cases, including representation learning, recommender systems, or any scenario with deep neural network models.

Take me to this video

Discover the technology that powers our AI services

Figure 3. Discover the technology that powers our AI services

How our customers are implementing machine learning on AWS

The following resources drill down into the ML infrastructure that’s used to train large models at Pinterest and the experimentation framework built by Booking.com.

The Pinterest video discusses the strategy to create an ML development environment, orchestrate training jobs, ingest data into the training loop, and accelerate the training speed. You can also learn about the advantages derived from containers in the context of ML and how Pinterest decided to set up the entire ML lifecycle, including distributed model training.

The second resource covers how Booking.com accelerated the experimentation process by leveraging Amazon SageMaker for data analysis, model training, and online experimentation. This resulted in shorter development times for their ranking models and increased speed for the data science teams.

Take me to Pinterest video

Take me to Booking.com blog post

Let’s discover how Pinterest is using AWS services for machine learning workloads

Figure 4. Let’s discover how Pinterest is using AWS services for machine learning workloads

SageMaker Immersion Day

Amazon SageMaker Immersion Day helps customers and partners provide end-to-end understanding of building ML use cases. From feature engineering to understanding various built-in algorithms, with a focus on training, tuning, and deploying the ML model in a production-like scenario, this workshop guides you to bring your own model to perform lift-and-shift from on-premises to the Amazon SageMaker platform. It further demonstrates more advanced concepts like model debugging, model monitoring, and AutoML.

Take me to the workshop

Train, tune and deploy your workload using Amazon SageMaker

Figure 5. Train, tune and deploy your workload using Amazon SageMaker

See you next time!

Thanks for reading! With this post, introduced you to the art of possibility on using AWS machine learning services. In the next blog, we will talk about cloud migrations.

To revisit any of our previous posts or explore the entire series, visit the Let’s Architect! page.

The art of possible: Three themes from RSA Conference 2024

Post Syndicated from Anne Grahn original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/the-art-of-possible-three-themes-from-rsa-conference-2024/

San Francisco skyline with Oakland Bay Bridge at sunset, California, USA

RSA Conference 2024 drew 650 speakers, 600 exhibitors, and thousands of security practitioners from across the globe to the Moscone Center in San Francisco, California from May 6 through 9.

The keynote lineup was diverse, with 33 presentations featuring speakers ranging from WarGames actor Matthew Broderick, to public and private-sector luminaries such as Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) Director Jen Easterly, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, security technologist Bruce Schneier, and cryptography experts Tal Rabin, Whitfield Diffie, and Adi Shamir.

Topics aligned with this year’s conference theme, “The art of possible,” and focused on actions we can take to revolutionize technology through innovation, while fortifying our defenses against an evolving threat landscape.

This post highlights three themes that caught our attention: artificial intelligence (AI) security, the Secure by Design approach to building products and services, and Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) collaboration.

AI security

Organizations in all industries have started building generative AI applications using large language models (LLMs) and other foundation models (FMs) to enhance customer experiences, transform operations, improve employee productivity, and create new revenue channels. So it’s not surprising that AI dominated conversations. Over 100 sessions touched on the topic, and the desire of attendees to understand AI technology and learn how to balance its risks and opportunities was clear.

“Discussions of artificial intelligence often swirl with mysticism regarding how an AI system functions. The reality is far more simple: AI is a type of software system.” — CISA

FMs and the applications built around them are often used with highly sensitive business data such as personal data, compliance data, operational data, and financial information to optimize the model’s output. As we explore the advantages of generative AI, protecting highly sensitive data and investments is a top priority. However, many organizations aren’t paying enough attention to security.

A joint generative AI security report released by Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the IBM Institute for Business Value during the conference found that 82% of business leaders view secure and trustworthy AI as essential for their operations, but only 24% are actively securing generative AI models and embedding security processes in AI development. In fact, nearly 70% say innovation takes precedence over security, despite concerns over threats and vulnerabilities (detailed in Figure 1).

Figure 1: Generative AI adoption concerns

Figure 1: Generative AI adoption concerns, Source: IBM Security

Because data and model weights—the numerical values models learn and adjust as they train—are incredibly valuable, organizations need them to stay protected, secure, and private, whether that means restricting access from an organization’s own administrators, customers, or cloud service provider, or protecting data from vulnerabilities in software running in the organization’s own environment.

There is no silver AI-security bullet, but as the report points out, there are proactive steps you can take to start protecting your organization and leveraging AI technology to improve your security posture:

  1. Establish a governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) foundation. Trust in gen AI starts with new security governance models (Figure 2) that integrate and embed GRC capabilities into your AI initiatives, and include policies, processes, and controls that are aligned with your business objectives.

    Figure 2: Updating governance, risk, and compliance models

    Figure 2: Updating governance, risk, and compliance models, Source: IBM Security

    In the RSA Conference session AI: Law, Policy, and Common Sense Suggestions to Stay Out of Trouble, digital commerce and gaming attorney Behnam Dayanim highlighted ethical, policy, and legal considerations—including AI-specific regulations—as well as governance structures such as the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) AI Risk Management Framework (AI RMF 1.0) that can help maximize a successful implementation and minimize potential risk.

  2. Strengthen your security culture. When we think of securing AI, it’s natural to focus on technical measures that can help protect the business. But organizations are made up of people—not technology. Educating employees at all levels of the organization can help avoid preventable harms such as prompt-based risks and unapproved tool use, and foster a resilient culture of cybersecurity that supports effective risk mitigation, incident detection and response, and continuous collaboration.

    “You’ve got to understand early on that security can’t be effective if you’re running it like a project or a program. You really have to run it as an operational imperative—a core function of the business. That’s when magic can happen.” — Hart Rossman, Global Services Security Vice President at AWS
  3. Engage with partners. Developing and securing AI solutions requires resources and skills that many organizations lack. Partners can provide you with comprehensive security support—whether that’s informing and advising you about generative AI, or augmenting your delivery and support capabilities. This can help make your engineers and your security controls more effective.

    While many organizations purchase security products or solutions with embedded generative AI capabilities, nearly two-thirds, as detailed in Figure 3, report that their generative AI security capabilities come through some type of partner.

    Figure 3: More than 90% of security gen AI capabilities are coming from third-party products or partners

    Figure 3: Most security gen AI capabilities are coming from third-party products or partners, Source: IBM Security

    Tens of thousands of customers are using AWS, for example, to experiment and move transformative generative AI applications into production. AWS provides AI-powered tools and services, a Generative AI Innovation Center program, and an extensive network of AWS partners that have demonstrated expertise delivering machine learning (ML) and generative AI solutions. These resources can support your teams with hands-on help developing solutions mapped to your requirements, and a broader collection of knowledge they can use to help you make the nuanced decisions required for effective security.

View the joint report and AWS generative AI security resources for additional guidance.

Secure by Design

Building secure software was a popular and related focus at the conference. Insecure design is ranked as the number four critical web application security concern on the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) Top 10.

The concept known as Secure by Design is gaining importance in the effort to mitigate vulnerabilities early, minimize risks, and recognize security as a core business requirement. Secure by Design builds off of security models such as Zero Trust, and aims to reduce the burden of cybersecurity and break the cycle of constantly creating and applying updates by developing products that are foundationally secure.

More than 60 technology companies—including AWS—signed CISA’s Secure by Design Pledge during RSA Conference as part of a collaborative push to put security first when designing products and services.

The pledge demonstrates a commitment to making measurable progress towards seven goals within a year:

  • Broaden the use of multi-factor authentication (MFA)
  • Reduce default passwords
  • Enable a significant reduction in the prevalence of one or more vulnerability classes
  • Increase the installation of security patches by customers
  • Publish a vulnerability disclosure policy (VDP)
  • Demonstrate transparency in vulnerability reporting
  • Strengthen the ability of customers to gather evidence of cybersecurity intrusions affecting products

“From day one, we have pioneered secure by design and secure by default practices in the cloud, so AWS is designed to be the most secure place for customers to run their workloads. We are committed to continuing to help organizations around the world elevate their security posture, and we look forward to collaborating with CISA and other stakeholders to further grow and promote security by design and default practices.” — Chris Betz, CISO at AWS

The need for security by design applies to AI like any other software system. To protect users and data, we need to build security into ML and AI with a Secure by Design approach that considers these technologies to be part of a larger software system, and weaves security into the AI pipeline.

Since models tend to have very high privileges and access to data, integrating an AI bill of materials (AI/ML BOM) and Cryptography Bill of Materials (CBOM) into BOM processes can help you catalog security-relevant information, and gain visibility into model components and data sources. Additionally, frameworks and standards such as the AI RMF 1.0, the HITRUST AI Assurance Program, and ISO/IEC 42001 can facilitate the incorporation of trustworthiness considerations into the design, development, and use of AI systems.

CISO collaboration

In the RSA Conference keynote session CISO Confidential: What Separates The Best From The Rest, Trellix CEO Bryan Palma and CISO Harold Rivas noted that there are approximately 32,000 global CISOs today—4 times more than 10 years ago. The challenges they face include staffing shortages, liability concerns, and a rapidly evolving threat landscape. According to research conducted by the Information Systems Security Association (ISSA), nearly half of organizations (46%) report that their cybersecurity team is understaffed, and more than 80% of CISOs recently surveyed by Trellix have experienced an increase in cybersecurity threats over the past six months. When asked what would most improve their organizations’ abilities to defend against these threats, their top answer was industry peers sharing insights and best practices.

Building trusted relationships with peers and technology partners can help you gain the knowledge you need to effectively communicate the story of risk to your board of directors, keep up with technology, and build success as a CISO.

AWS CISO Circles provide a forum for cybersecurity executives from organizations of all sizes and industries to share their challenges, insights, and best practices. CISOs come together in locations around the world to discuss the biggest security topics of the moment. With NDAs in place and the Chatham House Rule in effect, security leaders can feel free to speak their minds, ask questions, and get feedback from peers through candid conversations facilitated by AWS Security leaders.

“When it comes to security, community unlocks possibilities. CISO Circles give us an opportunity to deeply lean into CISOs’ concerns, and the topics that resonate with them. Chatham House Rule gives security leaders the confidence they need to speak openly and honestly with each other, and build a global community of knowledge-sharing and support.” — Clarke Rodgers, Director of Enterprise Strategy at AWS

At RSA Conference, CISO Circle attendees discussed the challenges of adopting generative AI. When asked whether CISOs or the business own generative AI risk for the organization, the consensus was that security can help with policies and recommendations, but the business should own the risk and decisions about how and when to use the technology. Some attendees noted that they took initial responsibility for generative AI risk, before transitioning ownership to an advisory board or committee comprised of leaders from their HR, legal, IT, finance, privacy, and compliance and ethics teams over time. Several CISOs expressed the belief that quickly taking ownership of generative AI risk before shepherding it to the right owner gave them a valuable opportunity to earn trust with their boards and executive peers, and to demonstrate business leadership during a time of uncertainty.

Embrace the art of possible

There are many more RSA Conference highlights on a wide range of additional topics, including post-quantum cryptography developments, identity and access management, data perimeters, threat modeling, cybersecurity budgets, and cyber insurance trends. If there’s one key takeaway, it’s that we should never underestimate what is possible from threat actors or defenders. By harnessing AI’s potential while addressing its risks, building foundationally secure products and services, and developing meaningful collaboration, we can collectively strengthen security and establish cyber resilience.

Join us to learn more about cloud security in the age of generative AI at AWS re:Inforce 2024 June 10–12 in Pennsylvania. Register today with the code SECBLOfnakb to receive a limited time $150 USD discount, while supplies last.

 
If you have feedback about this post, submit comments in the Comments section below. If you have questions about this post, contact AWS Support.

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Anne Grahn

Anne Grahn

Anne is a Senior Worldwide Security GTM Specialist at AWS, based in Chicago. She has more than a decade of experience in the security industry, and focuses on effectively communicating cybersecurity risk. She maintains a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) certification.

Danielle Ruderman

Danielle Ruderman

Danielle is a Senior Manager for the AWS Worldwide Security Specialist Organization, where she leads a team that enables global CISOs and security leaders to better secure their cloud environments. Danielle is passionate about improving security by building company security culture that starts with employee engagement.

AWS Weekly Roundup – LlamaIndex support for Amazon Neptune, force AWS CloudFormation stack deletion, and more (May 27, 2024)

Post Syndicated from Antje Barth original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-weekly-roundup-llamaindex-support-for-amazon-neptune-force-aws-cloudformation-stack-deletion-and-more-may-27-2024/

Last week, Dr. Matt Wood, VP for AI Products at Amazon Web Services (AWS), delivered the keynote at the AWS Summit Los Angeles. Matt and guest speakers shared the latest advancements in generative artificial intelligence (generative AI), developer tooling, and foundational infrastructure, showcasing how they come together to change what’s possible for builders. You can watch the full keynote on YouTube.

AWS Summit LA 2024 keynote

Announcements during the LA Summit included two new Amazon Q courses as part of Amazon’s AI Ready initiative to provide free AI skills training to 2 million people globally by 2025. The courses are part of the Amazon Q learning plan. But that’s not all that happened last week.

Last week’s launches
Here are some launches that got my attention:

LlamaIndex support for Amazon Neptune — You can now build Graph Retrieval Augmented Generation (GraphRAG) applications by combining knowledge graphs stored in Amazon Neptune and LlamaIndex, a popular open source framework for building applications with large language models (LLMs) such as those available in Amazon Bedrock. To learn more, check the LlamaIndex documentation for Amazon Neptune Graph Store.

AWS CloudFormation launches a new parameter called DeletionMode for the DeleteStack API — You can use the AWS CloudFormation DeleteStack API to delete your stacks and stack resources. However, certain stack resources can prevent the DeleteStack API from successfully completing, for example, when you attempt to delete non-empty Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets. The DeleteStack API can enter into the DELETE_FAILED state in such scenarios. With this launch, you can now pass FORCE_DELETE_STACK value to the new DeletionMode parameter and delete such stacks. To learn more, check the DeleteStack API documentation.

Mistral Small now available in Amazon Bedrock — The Mistral Small foundation model (FM) from Mistral AI is now generally available in Amazon Bedrock. This a fast-follow to our recent announcements of Mistral 7B and Mixtral 8x7B in March, and Mistral Large in April. Mistral Small, developed by Mistral AI, is a highly efficient large language model (LLM) optimized for high-volume, low-latency language-based tasks. To learn more, check Esra’s post.

New Amazon CloudFront edge location in Cairo, Egypt — The new AWS edge location brings the full suite of benefits provided by Amazon CloudFront, a secure, highly distributed, and scalable content delivery network (CDN) that delivers static and dynamic content, APIs, and live and on-demand video with low latency and high performance. Customers in Egypt can expect up to 30 percent improvement in latency, on average, for data delivered through the new edge location. To learn more about AWS edge locations, visit CloudFront edge locations.

Amazon OpenSearch Service zero-ETL integration with Amazon S3 — This Amazon OpenSearch Service integration offers a new efficient way to query operational logs in Amazon S3 data lakes, eliminating the need to switch between tools to analyze data. You can get started by installing out-of-the-box dashboards for AWS log types such as Amazon VPC Flow Logs, AWS WAF Logs, and Elastic Load Balancing (ELB). To learn more, check out the Amazon OpenSearch Service Integrations page and the Amazon OpenSearch Service Developer Guide.

For a full list of AWS announcements, be sure to keep an eye on the What’s New at AWS page.

Other AWS news
Here are some additional news items and a Twitch show that you might find interesting:

AWS Build On Generative AIBuild On Generative AI — Now streaming every Thursday, 2:00 PM US PT on twitch.tv/aws, my colleagues Tiffany and Mike discuss different aspects of generative AI and invite guest speakers to demo their work. Check out show notes and the full list of episodes on community.aws.

Amazon Bedrock Studio bootstrapper script — We’ve heard your feedback! To everyone who struggled setting up the required AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles and permissions to get started with Amazon Bedrock Studio: You can now use the Bedrock Studio bootstrapper script to automate the creation of the permissions boundary, service role, and provisioning role.

Upcoming AWS events
Check your calendars and sign up for these AWS events:

AWS SummitsAWS Summits — It’s AWS Summit season! Join free online and in-person events that bring the cloud computing community together to connect, collaborate, and learn about AWS. Register in your nearest city: Dubai (May 29), Bangkok (May 30), Stockholm (June 4), Madrid (June 5), and Washington, DC (June 26–27).

AWS re:InforceAWS re:Inforce — Join us for AWS re:Inforce (June 10–12) in Philadelphia, PA. AWS re:Inforce is a learning conference focused on AWS security solutions, cloud security, compliance, and identity. Connect with the AWS teams that build the security tools and meet AWS customers to learn about their security journeys.

AWS Community DaysAWS Community Days — Join community-led conferences that feature technical discussions, workshops, and hands-on labs led by expert AWS users and industry leaders from around the world: Midwest | Columbus (June 13), Sri Lanka (June 27), Cameroon (July 13), New Zealand (August 15), Nigeria (August 24), and New York (August 28).

You can browse all upcoming in-person and virtual events.

That’s all for this week. Check back next Monday for another Weekly Roundup!

— Antje

This post is part of our Weekly Roundup series. Check back each week for a quick roundup of interesting news and announcements from AWS!

Optimized for low-latency workloads, Mistral Small now available in Amazon Bedrock

Post Syndicated from Esra Kayabali original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/optimized-for-low-latency-workloads-mistral-small-now-available-in-amazon-bedrock/

Today, I am happy to announce that the Mistral Small foundation model (FM) from Mistral AI is now generally available in Amazon Bedrock. This a fast-follow to our recent announcements of Mistral 7B and Mixtral 8x7B in March, and Mistral Large in April. You can now access four high-performing models from Mistral AI in Amazon Bedrock including Mistral Small, Mistral Large, Mistral 7B, and Mixtral 8x7B, further expanding model choice.

Mistral Small, developed by Mistral AI, is a highly efficient large language model (LLM) optimized for high-volume, low-latency language-based tasks. Mistral Small is perfectly suited for straightforward tasks that can be performed in bulk, such as classification, customer support, or text generation. It provides outstanding performance at a cost-effective price point.

Some key features of Mistral Small you need to know about:

  • Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) specialization – Mistral Small ensures that important information is retained even in long context windows, which can extend up to 32K tokens.
  • Coding proficiency – Mistral Small excels in code generation, review, and commenting, supporting major coding languages.
  • Multilingual capability – Mistral Small delivers top-tier performance in French, German, Spanish, and Italian, in addition to English. It also supports dozens of other languages.

Getting started with Mistral Small
I first need access to the model to get started with Mistral Small. I go to the Amazon Bedrock console, choose Model access, and then choose Manage model access. I expand the Mistral AI section, choose Mistral Small, and then choose Save changes.

I now have model access to Mistral Small, and I can start using it in Amazon Bedrock. I refresh the Base models table to view the current status.

I use the following template to build a prompt for the model to get sub-optimal outputs:

<s>[INST] Instruction [/INST]

Note that <s> is a special token for beginning of string (BOS) while [INST] and [/INST] are regular strings.

I try the following prompt to see a classification example:

Prompt:

<s>[INST] Classify the following email to determine if it is spam or not. Only respond with the exact words "Spam" or "Not spam".
🎉 Limited time offer! Buy 2, Get 1 Free! Offer ends today! Don't miss out the CHANCE TO SAVE, please click on the link below: https://bit.ly/buy-2-get-1-free [/INST]

Mistral 7B, Mixtral 8x7B, and Mistral Large can all correctly classify this email as “Spam.” Mistral Small is also able to classify this accurately, just as the larger models can. I also try several similar tasks, such as generating a Bash script from a text prompt and generating a recipe to prepare yoghurt, and get good results. For this reason, Mistral Small is the most cost-effective and efficient option of the Mistral AI models in Amazon Bedrock for such tasks.

Mistral Small excels in multilingual tasks. Along with English, it delivers superior performance in French, German, Spanish, and Italian. I test the model’s understanding of the German language by asking it to give me two sentences about sustainability:

Prompt:

<s>[INST] Geben Sie mir zwei Sätze zum Thema Nachhaltigkeit. [/INST]

Output:

1. Nachhaltigkeit bedeutet, die Bedürfnisse der heutigen Generation zu befriedigen, ohne die Möglichkeiten künftiger Generationen zu gefährden.
2. Ein nachhaltiger Lebensstil umfasst den bewussten Umgang mit Ressourcen, wie Wasser, Energie und Rohstoffen, sowie den Schutz von Umwelt und Klima.
Diese Sätze sollten Ihnen einen guten Überblick über das Thema Nachhaltigkeit geben.

Programmatically interact with Mistral Small
I can use AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) and AWS Software Development Kit (SDK) to programmatically interact with Mistral Small using Amazon Bedrock APIs. I use the following code in Python, which interacts with Amazon Bedrock Runtime APIs with AWS SDK, asking, “What is the color of the sky?”:

import argparse
import boto3
from botocore.exceptions import ClientError
import json

accept = "application/json"
content_type = "application/json"

def invoke_model(model_id, input_data, region, streaming): 
  client = boto3.client('bedrock-runtime', region_name=region)
  try:
    if streaming:
      response = client.invoke_model_with_response_stream(body=input_data, modelId=model_id, accept=accept, contentType=content_type)
    else:
      response = client.invoke_model(body=input_data, modelId=model_id, accept=accept, contentType=content_type)
    status_code = response['ResponseMetadata']['HTTPStatusCode']
    print(json.loads(response.get('body').read()))
  except ClientError as e:
    print(e)

if __name__ == "__main__":
  parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(description="Bedrock Testing Tool")
  parser.add_argument("--prompt", type=str, help="prompt to use", default="Hello")
  parser.add_argument("--max-tokens", type=int, default=64)
  parser.add_argument("--streaming", choices=["true", "false"], help="whether to stream or not", default="false")
  args = parser.parse_args()
  streaming = False
  if args.streaming == "true":
    streaming = True
  input_data = json.dumps({
    "prompt": f"<s>[INST]{args.prompt}[/INST]",
    "max_tokens": args.max_tokens
  })
  invoke_model(model_id="mistral.mistral-small-2402-v1:0", input_data=input_data, region="us-east-1", streaming=streaming)

I get the following output:

{'outputs': [{'text': ' The color of the sky can vary depending on the time of day, weather,', 'stop_reason': 'length'}]}

Now available
The Mistral Small model is now available in Amazon Bedrock in the US East (N. Virginia) Region.

To learn more, visit the Mistral AI in Amazon Bedrock product page. For pricing details, review the Amazon Bedrock pricing page.

To get started with Mistral Small in Amazon Bedrock, visit the Amazon Bedrock console and Amazon Bedrock User Guide.

— Esra

Personal AI Assistants and Privacy

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/05/personal-ai-assistants-and-privacy.html

Microsoft is trying to create a personal digital assistant:

At a Build conference event on Monday, Microsoft revealed a new AI-powered feature called “Recall” for Copilot+ PCs that will allow Windows 11 users to search and retrieve their past activities on their PC. To make it work, Recall records everything users do on their PC, including activities in apps, communications in live meetings, and websites visited for research. Despite encryption and local storage, the new feature raises privacy concerns for certain Windows users.

I wrote about this AI trust problem last year:

One of the promises of generative AI is a personal digital assistant. Acting as your advocate with others, and as a butler with you. This requires an intimacy greater than your search engine, email provider, cloud storage system, or phone. You’re going to want it with you 24/7, constantly training on everything you do. You will want it to know everything about you, so it can most effectively work on your behalf.

And it will help you in many ways. It will notice your moods and know what to suggest. It will anticipate your needs and work to satisfy them. It will be your therapist, life coach, and relationship counselor.

You will default to thinking of it as a friend. You will speak to it in natural language, and it will respond in kind. If it is a robot, it will look humanoid—­or at least like an animal. It will interact with the whole of your existence, just like another person would.

[…]

And you will want to trust it. It will use your mannerisms and cultural references. It will have a convincing voice, a confident tone, and an authoritative manner. Its personality will be optimized to exactly what you like and respond to.

It will act trustworthy, but it will not be trustworthy. We won’t know how they are trained. We won’t know their secret instructions. We won’t know their biases, either accidental or deliberate.

We do know that they are built at enormous expense, mostly in secret, by profit-maximizing corporations for their own benefit.

[…]

All of this is a long-winded way of saying that we need trustworthy AI. AI whose behavior, limitations, and training are understood. AI whose biases are understood, and corrected for. AI whose goals are understood. That won’t secretly betray your trust to someone else.

The market will not provide this on its own. Corporations are profit maximizers, at the expense of society. And the incentives of surveillance capitalism are just too much to resist.

We are going to need some sort of public AI to counterbalance all of these corporate AIs.

EDITED TO ADD (5/24): Lots of comments about Microsoft Recall and security:

This:

Because Recall is “default allow” (it relies on a list of things not to record) … it’s going to vacuum up huge volumes and heretofore unknown types of data, most of which are ephemeral today. The “we can’t avoid saving passwords if they’re not masked” warning Microsoft included is only the tip of that iceberg. There’s an ocean of data that the security ecosystem assumes is “out of reach” because it’s either never stored, or it’s encrypted in transit. All of that goes out the window if the endpoint is just going to…turn around and write it to disk. (And local encryption at rest won’t help much here if the data is queryable in the user’s own authentication context!)

This:

The fact that Microsoft’s new Recall thing won’t capture DRM content means the engineers do understand the risk of logging everything. They just chose to preference the interests of corporates and money over people, deliberately.

This:

Microsoft Recall is going to make post-breach impact analysis impossible. Right now IR processes can establish a timeline of data stewardship to identify what information may have been available to an attacker based on the level of access they obtained. It’s not trivial work, but IR folks can do it. Once a system with Recall is compromised, all data that has touched that system is potentially compromised too, and the ML indirection makes it near impossible to confidently identify a blast radius.

This:

You may be in a position where leaders in your company are hot to turn on Microsoft Copilot Recall. Your best counterargument isn’t threat actors stealing company data. It’s that opposing counsel will request the recall data and demand it not be disabled as part of e-discovery proceedings.

AI Trust Risk and Security Management: Why Tackle Them Now?

Post Syndicated from Laura Ellis original https://blog.rapid7.com/2024/05/15/ai-trust-risk-and-security-management-why-tackle-them-now/

AI Trust Risk and Security Management: Why Tackle Them Now?

Co-authored by Sabeen Malik and Laura Ellis

In the evolving world of artificial intelligence (AI), keeping our customers secure and maintaining their trust is our top priority. As AI technologies integrate more deeply into our daily operations and services, they bring a set of unique challenges that demand a robust management strategy:

  1. The Black Box Dilemma: AI models pose significant challenges in terms of transparency and predictability. This opaque nature can complicate efforts to diagnose and rectify issues, making predictability and reliability hard to achieve.
  2. Model Fragility: AI’s performance is closely tied to the data it processes. Over time, subtle changes in data input—known as data drift—can degrade an AI system’s accuracy, necessitating constant monitoring and adjustments.
  3. Easy Access, Big Responsibility: The democratization of AI through cloud services means that powerful AI tools are just a few clicks away for developers. This ease of access underscores the need for rigorous security measures to prevent misuse and effectively manage vulnerabilities.
  4. Staying Ahead of the Curve: With AI regulation still in its formative stages, proactive development of self-regulatory frameworks like ours helps inform our future AI regulatory compliance frameworks; but most importantly, it builds trust among our customers. When thinking about AI’s promises and challenges, we know that trust is earned. But that trust is also is of concern for global policymakers, and that is why we are looking forward to engaging with NIST on discussions related to the AI Risk Management, Cyber Security, and Privacy frameworks. It’s  also why we were an inaugural signer of the CISA Secure by Design Pledge to demonstrate to government stakeholders and customers our commitment to building things and understanding the stakes at large.

Our TRiSM (Trust, Risk, and Security Management) framework isn’t merely a component of our operations—it’s a foundational strategy that guides us in navigating the intricate landscape of AI with confidence and security.

How We Approach AI Security at Rapid7

Rapid7 leverages the best available technology to protect our customers’ attack surfaces. Our mission drives us to keep abreast of the latest AI advancements to deliver optimal value to customers while effectively managing the inherent risks of the technology.

Innovation and scientific excellence are key aspects of our AI strategy. We strive for continuous improvement, leveraging the latest technological innovations and scientific research. By engaging with thought leaders and adopting best practices, we aim to stay at the forefront of AI technology, ensuring our solutions are not only effective but also pioneering and thoughtful.

Our AI principles center on transparency, fairness, safety, security, privacy, and accountability. These principles are not just guidelines; they are integral to how we build, deploy, and manage our AI systems. Accountability is a cornerstone of our strategy, and we hold ourselves responsible for the proper functioning of our AI systems so we can ensure they respect and embody our principles throughout their lifecycle. This includes ongoing oversight, regular audits, and adjustments as needed based on feedback and evolving standards.

We have leveraged a number of AI risk management frameworks to inform our approach.  Most notably, we have adopted the NIST AI Risk Management Framework and the Open Standard for Responsible AI. These frameworks help us comprehensively assess and manage AI risks, from the early stages of development through deployment and ongoing use. The NIST framework provides a thorough methodology for lifecycle risk management, while the Open Standard offers practical tools for evaluation and ensures that our AI systems are user-centric and responsible.

We are committed to ensuring that our AI deployments are not only technologically advanced but also adhere to the highest standards of security and ethical responsibility.

AI Integration in Action: Making It Work Day-to-Day

We take a practical approach to adhere to our AI TRiSM framework by integrating it into the daily operations of our existing technologies and processes, ensuring that AI enhances rather than complicates our security posture:

  1. Clear Rules: We have developed and implemented detailed enterprise-wide policies and operational procedures that govern the deployment and use of AI technologies. These guidelines ensure consistency and compliance across all departments and initiatives.
  2. Transparency Matters: We leverage our own tooling to gain visibility into our cloud security posture for AI.  We leverage InsightCloudSec solutions to provide comprehensive visibility into our AI deployments across various environments. This visibility is crucial for our security strategy, encapsulated by the philosophy, “You can’t protect what you can’t see.” It allows us to monitor, evaluate, and adjust our AI resources proactively.
  3. Throughout the Development Lifecycle: We integrate rigorous AI evaluations at every phase of our software development lifecycle. From the initial development stages to production and through regular post-deployment assessments, our framework ensures that AI systems are safe, effective, and aligned with our ethical standards.
  4. Smart Governance: By embedding AI-specific governance protocols into our existing code and cloud configuration management systems, we maintain strict control over all AI-related activities. This integration ensures that our AI initiatives comply with established best practices and regulatory requirements.
  5. Empowering Our Team: We recognize the critical need for advanced AI skills in today’s tech landscape. To address this, we offer training programs and collaborative opportunities, which not only foster innovation but also ensure adherence to best practices. This approach empowers our teams to innovate confidently within a secure and supportive environment.

Integrating AI into our core processes enhances our operational security and underscores our commitment to ethical innovation. At Rapid7, we are dedicated to leading responsibly in the AI space, ensuring that our technological advancements positively contribute to our customers, company, and society.

Our AI TRiSM framework is not merely a set of policies—it’s a proactive, strategic approach to securely and ethically harnessing new technologies. As we continue to innovate and push the boundaries of what’s possible with AI, we stay focused on setting a high bar for standards of responsible and secure AI usage, ensuring that our customers always receive the best technology solutions. Learn more here.

New Attack Against Self-Driving Car AI

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/05/new-attack-against-self-driving-car-ai.html

This is another attack that convinces the AI to ignore road signs:

Due to the way CMOS cameras operate, rapidly changing light from fast flashing diodes can be used to vary the color. For example, the shade of red on a stop sign could look different on each line depending on the time between the diode flash and the line capture.

The result is the camera capturing an image full of lines that don’t quite match each other. The information is cropped and sent to the classifier, usually based on deep neural networks, for interpretation. Because it’s full of lines that don’t match, the classifier doesn’t recognize the image as a traffic sign.

So far, all of this has been demonstrated before.

Yet these researchers not only executed on the distortion of light, they did it repeatedly, elongating the length of the interference. This meant an unrecognizable image wasn’t just a single anomaly among many accurate images, but rather a constant unrecognizable image the classifier couldn’t assess, and a serious security concern.

[…]

The researchers developed two versions of a stable attack. The first was GhostStripe1, which is not targeted and does not require access to the vehicle, we’re told. It employs a vehicle tracker to monitor the victim’s real-time location and dynamically adjust the LED flickering accordingly.

GhostStripe2 is targeted and does require access to the vehicle, which could perhaps be covertly done by a hacker while the vehicle is undergoing maintenance. It involves placing a transducer on the power wire of the camera to detect framing moments and refine timing control.

Research paper.

How Criminals Are Using Generative AI

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/05/how-criminals-are-using-generative-ai.html

There’s a new report on how criminals are using generative AI tools:

Key Takeaways:

  • Adoption rates of AI technologies among criminals lag behind the rates of their industry counterparts because of the evolving nature of cybercrime.
  • Compared to last year, criminals seem to have abandoned any attempt at training real criminal large language models (LLMs). Instead, they are jailbreaking existing ones.
  • We are finally seeing the emergence of actual criminal deepfake services, with some bypassing user verification used in financial services.

A new generative engine and three voices are now generally available on Amazon Polly

Post Syndicated from Channy Yun original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/a-new-generative-engine-and-three-voices-are-now-generally-available-on-amazon-polly/

Today, we are announcing the general availability of the generative engine of Amazon Polly with three voices: Ruth and Matthew in American English and Amy in British English. The new generative engine was trained with publicly available and proprietary data, a variety of voices, languages, and styles. It performs with the highest precision to render context-dependent prosody, pausing, spelling, dialectal properties, foreign word pronunciation, and more.

Amazon Polly is a machine learning (ML) service that converts text to lifelike speech, called text-to-speech (TTS) technology. Now, Amazon Polly includes high-quality, natural-sounding human-like voices in dozens of languages, so you can select the ideal voice and distribute your speech-enabled applications in many locales or countries.

With Amazon Polly, you can select various voice options, including neural, long-form, and generative voices, which deliver ground-breaking improvements in speech quality and produce human-like, highly expressive, and emotionally adept voices. You can store speech output in standard formats like MP3 or OGG, adjust the speech rate, pitch, or volume with Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) tags, and quickly deliver lifelike voices and conversational user experiences with consistently fast response times.

What’s the new generative engine?
Amazon Polly now supports four voice engines: standard, neural, long-form, and generative voices.

Standard TTS voices, introduced in 2016 use traditional concatenative synthesis. This method strings together the phonemes of recorded speech, producing very natural-sounding synthesized speech. However, the inevitable variations in speech and the techniques used to segment the waveforms limit the quality of speech.

Neural TTS (NTTS) voices, introduced in 2019, use a sequence-to-sequence neural network that converts a sequence of phonemes into spectrograms, and a neural vocoder that converts the spectrograms into a continuous audio signal. The NTTS produces even higher quality human-like voices than its standard voices.

Long-form voices, introduced in 2023, are developed with cutting-edge deep learning TTS technology and designed to captivate listeners’ attention for longer content, such as news articles, training materials, or marketing videos.

In February 2024, Amazon scientists introduced a new research TTS model called Big Adaptive Streamable TTS with Emergent abilities (BASE). With this technology, Polly Generative engine is able to create human-like synthetically generated voices. You can use these voices as a knowledgeable customer assistant, a virtual trainer, or an experienced marketer.

Here are the new generative voices:

Name Locale Gender Language Sample prompt NTTS voices
 Generative voices
Ruth en_US Female English (US) Selma was lying on the ground halfway down the steps. 'Selma! Selma!' we shouted in panic.
Matthew en_US Male English (US) The guards were standing outside with some of our neighbours, listening to a transistor radio. 'Any good news?' I asked. 'No, we're listening to the names of people who were killed yesterday,' Bruno replied.
Amy en_GB Female English (British) What are you looking at?' he said as he stood over me. They got off the bus and started searching the baggage compartment. The tension on the bus was like a dark, menacing cloud that hovered above us.

You can choose from these voice options to suit your application and use case. To learn more about the generative engine, visit Generative voices in the AWS documentation.

Get started with using generative voices
You can access the new voices using the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), or the AWS SDKs.

To get started, go to the Amazon Polly console in the US (N. Virginia) Region and choose Text-to-Speech menu in the left pane. If you select the voice of Ruth or Matthew in the language of English, US or Amy in English, UK, you can choose Generative engine. Input your text and listen to or download the generated voice output.

Using the CLI, you can list the voices that use the new generative engine:

$ aws polly describe-voices --output json --region us-east-1 \
| jq -r '.Voices[] | select(.SupportedEngines | index("generative")) | .Name'

Matthew
Amy
Ruth

Now, run the synthesize-speech CLI command to synthesize sample text to an audio file (hello.mp3) with the parameters of generative engine and a supported voice ID.

$ aws polly synthesize-speech --output-format mp3 --region us-east-1 \
  --text "Hello. This is my first generative voices!" \
  --voice-id Matthew --engine generative hello.mp3

To learn more code examples using AWS SDKs, visit Code and Application Examples in the AWS documentation. You can use Java and Python code examples, application examples such as web applications using Java or Python, or iOS and Android applications.

Now available
The new generative voices of Amazon Polly are now available today in the US East (N. Virginia) Region. You only pay for what you use based on the number of characters of text that you convert to speech. To learn more, visit our Amazon Polly Pricing page.

Give new generative voices a try in the Amazon Polly console today and send feedback to AWS re:Post for Amazon Polly or through your usual AWS Support contacts.

— Channy

Build RAG and agent-based generative AI applications with new Amazon Titan Text Premier model, available in Amazon Bedrock

Post Syndicated from Antje Barth original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/build-rag-and-agent-based-generative-ai-applications-with-new-amazon-titan-text-premier-model-available-in-amazon-bedrock/

Today, we’re happy to welcome a new member of the Amazon Titan family of models: Amazon Titan Text Premier, now available in Amazon Bedrock.

Following Amazon Titan Text Lite and Titan Text Express, Titan Text Premier is the latest large language model (LLM) in the Amazon Titan family of models, further increasing your model choice within Amazon Bedrock. You can now choose between the following Titan Text models in Bedrock:

  • Titan Text Premier is the most advanced Titan LLM for text-based enterprise applications. With a maximum context length of 32K tokens, it has been specifically optimized for enterprise use cases, such as building Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) and agent-based applications with Knowledge Bases and Agents for Amazon Bedrock. As with all Titan LLMs, Titan Text Premier has been pre-trained on multilingual text data but is best suited for English-language tasks. You can further custom fine-tune (preview) Titan Text Premier with your own data in Amazon Bedrock to build applications that are specific to your domain, organization, brand style, and use case. I’ll dive deeper into model highlights and performance in the following sections of this post.
  • Titan Text Express is ideal for a wide range of tasks, such as open-ended text generation and conversational chat. The model has a maximum context length of 8K tokens.
  • Titan Text Lite is optimized for speed, is highly customizable, and is ideal to be fine-tuned for tasks such as article summarization and copywriting. The model has a maximum context length of 4K tokens.

Now, let’s discuss Titan Text Premier in more detail.

Amazon Titan Text Premier model highlights
Titan Text Premier has been optimized for high-quality RAG and agent-based applications and customization through fine-tuning while incorporating responsible artificial intelligence (AI) practices.

Optimized for RAG and agent-based applications – Titan Text Premier has been specifically optimized for RAG and agent-based applications in response to customer feedback, where respondents named RAG as one of their key components in building generative AI applications. The model training data includes examples for tasks like summarization, Q&A, and conversational chat and has been optimized for integration with Knowledge Bases and Agents for Amazon Bedrock. The optimization includes training the model to handle the nuances of these features, such as their specific prompt formats.

  • High-quality RAG through integration with Knowledge Bases for Amazon Bedrock – With a knowledge base, you can securely connect foundation models (FMs) in Amazon Bedrock to your company data for RAG. You can now choose Titan Text Premier with Knowledge Bases to implement question-answering and summarization tasks over your company’s proprietary data.
    Amazon Titan Text Premier support in Knowledge Bases
  • Automating tasks through integration with Agents for Amazon Bedrock – You can also create custom agents that can perform multistep tasks across different company systems and data sources using Titan Text Premier with Agents for Amazon Bedrock. Using agents, you can automate tasks for your internal or external customers, such as managing retail orders or processing insurance claims.
    Amazon Titan Text Premier with Agents for Amazon Bedrock

We already see customers exploring Titan Text Premier to implement interactive AI assistants that create summaries from unstructured data such as emails. They’re also exploring the model to extract relevant information across company systems and data sources to create more meaningful product summaries.

Here’s a demo video created by my colleague Brooke Jamieson that shows an example of how you can put Titan Text Premier to work for your business.

Custom fine-tuning of Amazon Titan Text Premier (preview) – You can fine-tune Titan Text Premier with your own data in Amazon Bedrock to increase model accuracy by providing your own task-specific labeled training dataset. Customizing Titan Text Premier helps to further specialize your model and create unique user experiences that reflect your company’s brand, style, voice, and services.

Built responsibly – Amazon Titan Text Premier incorporates safe, secure, and trustworthy practices. The AWS AI Service Card for Amazon Titan Text Premier documents the model’s performance across key responsible AI benchmarks from safety and fairness to veracity and robustness. The model also integrates with Guardrails for Amazon Bedrock so you can implement additional safeguards customized to your application requirements and responsible AI policies. Amazon indemnifies customers who responsibly use Amazon Titan models against claims that generally available Amazon Titan models or their outputs infringe on third-party copyrights.

Amazon Titan Text Premier model performance
Titan Text Premier has been built to deliver broad intelligence and utility relevant for enterprises. The following table shows evaluation results on public benchmarks that assess critical capabilities, such as instruction following, reading comprehension, and multistep reasoning against price-comparable models. The strong performance across these diverse and challenging benchmarks highlights that Titan Text Premier is built to handle a wide range of use cases in enterprise applications, offering great price performance. For all benchmarks listed below, a higher score is a better score.

Capability Benchmark Description Amazon Google OpenAI
Titan Text Premier Gemini Pro 1.0 GPT-3.5
General MMLU
(Paper)		 Representation of questions in 57 subjects 70.4%
(5-shot)		 71.8%
(5-shot)		 70.0%
(5-shot)
Instruction following IFEval
(Paper)		 Instruction-following evaluation for large language models 64.6%
(0-shot)		 not published not published
Reading comprehension RACE-H
(Paper)		 Large-scale reading comprehension 89.7%
(5-shot)		 not published not published
Reasoning HellaSwag
(Paper)		 Common-sense reasoning 92.6%
(10-shot)		 84.7%
(10-shot)		 85.5%
(10-shot)
DROP, F1 score
(Paper)		 Reasoning over text 77.9
(3-shot)		 74.1
(Variable Shots)		 64.1
(3-shot)
BIG-Bench Hard
(Paper)		 Challenging tasks requiring multistep reasoning 73.7%
(3-shot CoT)		 75.0%
(3-shot CoT)		 not published
ARC-Challenge
(Paper)		 Common-sense reasoning 85.8%
(5-shot)		 not published 85.2%
(25-shot)

Note: Benchmarks evaluate model performance using a variation of few-shot and zero-shot prompting. With few-shot prompting, you provide the model with a number of concrete examples (three for 3-shot, five for 5-shot, etc.) of how to solve a specific task. This demonstrates the model’s ability to learn from example, called in-context learning. With zero-shot prompting on the other hand, you evaluate a model’s ability to perform tasks by relying only on its preexisting knowledge and general language understanding without providing any examples.

Get started with Amazon Titan Text Premier
To enable access to Amazon Titan Text Premier, navigate to the Amazon Bedrock console and choose Model access on the bottom left pane. On the Model access overview page, choose the Manage model access button in the upper right corner and enable access to Amazon Titan Text Premier.

Select Amazon Titan Text Premier in Amazon Bedrock model access page

To use Amazon Titan Text Premier in the Bedrock console, choose Text or Chat under Playgrounds in the left menu pane. Then choose Select model and select Amazon as the category and Titan Text Premier as the model. To explore the model, you can load examples. The following screenshot shows one of those examples that demonstrates the model’s chain of thought (CoT) and reasoning capabilities.

Amazon Titan Text Premier in the Amazon Bedrock chat playground

By choosing View API request, you can get a code example of how to invoke the model using the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) with the current example prompt. You can also access Amazon Bedrock and available models using the AWS SDKs. In the following example, I will use the AWS SDK for Python (Boto3).

Amazon Titan Text Premier in action
For this demo, I ask Amazon Titan Text Premier to summarize one of my previous AWS News Blog posts that announced the availability of Amazon Titan Image Generator and the watermark detection feature.

For summarization tasks, a recommended prompt template looks like this:

The following is text from a {{Text Category}}:
{{Text}}
Summarize the {{Text Category}} in {{length of summary}}

For more prompting best practices, check out the Amazon Titan Text Prompt Engineering Guidelines.

I adapt this template to my example and define the prompt. In preparation, I saved my News Blog post as a text file and read it into the post string variable.

prompt = """
The following is text from a AWS News Blog post:

<text>
%s
</text>

Summarize the above AWS News Blog post in a short paragraph.
""" % post

Similar to previous Amazon Titan Text models, Amazon Titan Text Premier supports temperature and topP inference parameters to control the randomness and diversity of the response, as well as maxTokenCount and stopSequences to control the length of the response.

import boto3
import json

bedrock_runtime = boto3.client(service_name="bedrock-runtime")

body = json.dumps({
    "inputText": prompt, 
    "textGenerationConfig":{  
        "maxTokenCount":256,
        "stopSequences":[],
        "temperature":0,
        "topP":0.9
    }
})

Then, I use the InvokeModel API to send the inference request.

response = bedrock_runtime.invoke_model(
    body=body,
	modelId="amazon.titan-text-premier-v1:0",
    accept="application/json", 
    contentType="application/json"
)

response_body = json.loads(response.get('body').read())
print(response_body.get('results')[0].get('outputText'))

And here’s the response:

Amazon Titan Image Generator is now generally available in Amazon Bedrock, giving you an easy way to build and scale generative AI applications with new image generation and image editing capabilities, including instant customization of images. Watermark detection for Titan Image Generator is now generally available in the Amazon Bedrock console. Today, we’re also introducing a new DetectGeneratedContent API (preview) in Amazon Bedrock that checks for the existence of this watermark and helps you confirm whether an image was generated by Titan Image Generator.

For more examples in different programming languages, check out the code examples section in the Amazon Bedrock User Guide.

More resources
Here are some additional resources that you might find helpful:

Intended use cases and more — Check out the AWS AI Service Card for Amazon Titan Text Premier to learn more about the models’ intended use cases, design, and deployment, as well as performance optimization best practices.

AWS Generative AI CDK Constructs — Amazon Titan Text Premier is supported by the AWS Generative AI CDK Constructs, an open source extension of the AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK), providing sample implementations of AWS CDK for common generative AI patterns.

Amazon Titan models — If you’re curious to learn more about Amazon Titan models in general, check out the following video. Dr. Sherry Marcus, Director of Applied Science for Amazon Bedrock, shares how the Amazon Titan family of models incorporates the 25 years of experience Amazon has innovating with AI and machine learning (ML) across its business.

Now available
Amazon Titan Text Premier is available today in the AWS US East (N. Virginia) Region. Custom fine-tuning for Amazon Titan Text Premier is available today in preview in the AWS US East (N. Virginia) Region. Check the full Region list for future updates. To learn more about the Amazon Titan family of models, visit the Amazon Titan product page. For pricing details, review the Amazon Bedrock pricing page.

Give Amazon Titan Text Premier a try in the Amazon Bedrock console today, send feedback to AWS re:Post for Amazon Bedrock or through your usual AWS contacts, and engage with the generative AI builder community at community.aws.

— Antje

Build generative AI applications with Amazon Bedrock Studio (preview)

Post Syndicated from Antje Barth original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/build-generative-ai-applications-with-amazon-bedrock-studio-preview/

Today, we’re introducing Amazon Bedrock Studio, a new web-based generative artificial intelligence (generative AI) development experience, in public preview. Amazon Bedrock Studio accelerates the development of generative AI applications by providing a rapid prototyping environment with key Amazon Bedrock features, including Knowledge Bases, Agents, and Guardrails.

As a developer, you can now use your company’s single sign-on credentials to sign in to Bedrock Studio and start experimenting. You can build applications using a wide array of top performing models, evaluate, and share your generative AI apps within Bedrock Studio. The user interface guides you through various steps to help improve a model’s responses. You can experiment with model settings, and securely integrate your company data sources, tools, and APIs, and set guardrails. You can collaborate with team members to ideate, experiment, and refine your generative AI applications—all without requiring advanced machine learning (ML) expertise or AWS Management Console access.

As an Amazon Web Services (AWS) administrator, you can be confident that developers will only have access to the features provided by Bedrock Studio, and won’t have broader access to AWS infrastructure and services.

Amazon Bedrock Studio

Now, let me show you how to get started with Amazon Bedrock Studio.

Get started with Amazon Bedrock Studio
As an AWS administrator, you first need to create an Amazon Bedrock Studio workspace, then select and add users you want to give access to the workspace. Once the workspace is created, you can share the workspace URL with the respective users. Users with access privileges can sign in to the workspace using single sign-on, create projects within their workspace, and start building generative AI applications.

Create Amazon Bedrock Studio workspace
Navigate to the Amazon Bedrock console and choose Bedrock Studio on the bottom left pane.

Amazon Bedrock Studio in the Bedrock console

Before creating a workspace, you need to configure and secure the single sign-on integration with your identity provider (IdP) using the AWS IAM Identity Center. For detailed instructions on how to configure various IdPs, such as AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory, Microsoft Entra ID, or Okta, check out the AWS IAM Identity Center User Guide. For this demo, I configured user access with the default IAM Identity Center directory.

Next, choose Create workspace, enter your workspace details, and create any required AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles.

If you want, you can also select default generative AI models and embedding models for the workspace. Once you’re done, choose Create.

Next, select the created workspace.

Amazon Bedrock Studio, workspace created

Then, choose User management and Add users or groups to select the users you want to give access to this workspace.

Add users to your Amazon Bedrock Studio workspace

Back in the Overview tab, you can now copy the Bedrock Studio URL and share it with your users.

Amazon Bedrock Studio, share workspace URL

Build generative AI applications using Amazon Bedrock Studio
As a builder, you can now navigate to the provided Bedrock Studio URL and sign in with your single sign-on user credentials. Welcome to Amazon Bedrock Studio! Let me show you how to choose from industry leading FMs, bring your own data, use functions to make API calls, and safeguard your applications using guardrails.

Choose from multiple industry leading FMs
By choosing Explore, you can start selecting available FMs and explore the models using natural language prompts.

Amazon Bedrock Studio UI

If you choose Build, you can start building generative AI applications in a playground mode, experiment with model configurations, iterate on system prompts to define the behavior of your application, and prototype new features.

Amazon Bedrock Studio - start building applications

Bring your own data
With Bedrock Studio, you can securely bring your own data to customize your application by providing a single file or by selecting a knowledge base created in Amazon Bedrock.

Amazon Bedrock Studio - start building applications

Use functions to make API calls and make model responses more relevant
A function call allows the FM to dynamically access and incorporate external data or capabilities when responding to a prompt. The model determines which function it needs to call based on an OpenAPI schema that you provide.

Functions enable a model to include information in its response that it doesn’t have direct access to or prior knowledge of. For example, a function could allow the model to retrieve and include the current weather conditions in its response, even though the model itself doesn’t have that information stored.

Amazon Bedrock Studio - Add functions

Safeguard your applications using Guardrails for Amazon Bedrock
You can create guardrails to promote safe interactions between users and your generative AI applications by implementing safeguards customized to your use cases and responsible AI policies.

Amazon Bedrock Studio - Add Guardrails

When you create applications in Amazon Bedrock Studio, the corresponding managed resources such as knowledge bases, agents, and guardrails are automatically deployed in your AWS account. You can use the Amazon Bedrock API to access those resources in downstream applications.

Here’s a short demo video of Amazon Bedrock Studio created by my colleague Banjo Obayomi.

Join the preview
Amazon Bedrock Studio is available today in public preview in AWS Regions US East (N. Virginia) and US West (Oregon). To learn more, visit the Amazon Bedrock Studio page and User Guide.

Give Amazon Bedrock Studio a try today and let us know what you think! Send feedback to AWS re:Post for Amazon Bedrock or through your usual AWS contacts, and engage with the generative AI builder community at community.aws.

— Antje