Tim Fist is a Senior Technology Fellow with the Institute for Progress, and a Senior Adjunct Fellow with the Technology and National Security Program at the Center for New American Security (CNAS). His work focuses on policy for AI compute and differential technological development. Previously, Tim was a Fellow at CNAS, and worked as the Head of Strategy & Governance at Fathom Radiant, an artificial intelligence hardware company. Prior to that work, Fist held several senior machine learning engineering positions, and was the Head of Product at Eliiza, a machine learning consultancy. His writing has been featured in Foreign Policy and ChinaTalk, and his work has been cited in numerous outlets, including Wired, Reuters, Inside AI Policy, The Wire China, and the Wall Street Journal.

With a background in machine learning and emerging AI hardware technologies, Fist brings a technical lens to problems in national security and AI policy. His career has ranged from developing and deploying AI systems for Fortune 500 companies, to writing code currently being used on a satellite in orbit. He has built software in a wide range of domains, including agriculture, finance, telecommunications, and space navigation. Originally from Australia, Fist holds a B.A. (Honors) in Aerospace Engineering, and a B.A. in Political Science, from Monash University.

Frontier AI workload classification

It will likely be useful to move toward a governance regime where compute providers (e.g. large cloud firms) provide an independent layer of verification on the activities of their customers. For example, it would be useful if compute providers submitted independent reports to the U.S. government whenever one of their customers ran a large-scale pre-training workload exceeding 10^26 operations (mirroring the current requirements imposed by the U.S. AI Executive Order on model developers). However, compute providers will typically (by design) have limited information about the workloads run by their customers. Can we use this information to develop and implement classification techniques that reliably classify workloads run on large clusters? Where classes of interest will likely be: "not deep learning", "pre-training", "fine-tuning", "inference".

Making workload classification techniques robust to distributional shift

Changes in the hardware, software packages, and specific algorithms used to run frontier AI workloads will likely degrade the accuracy of workload classification techniques over time, perhaps in sudden and unexpected ways. Can we design an overall process for developing, implementing, and monitoring the efficacy of workload classification techniques that is robust to this kind of degradation?

This is a follow-up project to "Frontier AI workload classification".

Making workload classification techniques robust to adversarial gaming

Workload classification becomes much harder in cases where the customer is actively trying to obfuscate their activities, by introducing deliberate noise in the code and/or data run as part of a workload. Can we design workload classification approaches that are robust to this kind of gaming (to within certain cost-efficiency bounds from the customer's perspective), or that are able to detect when this kind of gaming is occurring?

This is a follow-up project to "Frontier AI workload classification", and could possibly be combined with "Making workload classification techniques robust to distributional shift".

Tackling "compute structuring"

Compute-based reporting thresholds for training runs (e.g. the requirements in the U.S. AI Executive order) could be a useful way to ensure model developers are complying with best practices for AI safety. However, such thresholds are likely to be highly "gameable". One relevant case study comes from finance: in the United States, a law was introduced requiring banks to report all transactions above a particular threshold to the government, in order to monitor money laundering, tax evasion, and other nefarious financial activities. In response, "transaction structuring" became a widespread practice, where customers of banks eager to avoid scrutiny broke up their transactions into multiple transactions, each below the reporting threshold. There are two clear ways this could be done in compute world:

Breaking up a large workload into multiple sequential workloads, where each workload is run using a different cloud account or provider, each workload is below the compute threshold, and each workload takes as input partially-trained model weights from the previous workload. Distributing a large workload across multiple cloud accounts/providers, where each account/provider serves as a single data parallel worker within the larger distributed training run, periodically broadcasting/receiving weight updates from other workers.

What other forms of compute structuring might be possible? What are some effective technical solutions to both detect and prevent different forms of compute structuring? For example, tackling (1) might involve having compute providers report all workloads above a particular throughput (in terms of operations per second), and then aggregating those reports in order to identify (perhaps also informed by shared identity information based on KYC) likely sequential training runs. Tackling (2) might involve imposing technical boundaries on off-cluster latency/bandwidth in order to make such a scheme prohibitive from a cost-efficiency perspective.

A system for secure chip IDs

Being able to assign un-spoofable IDs to hardware devices in data centers will be extremely useful for tracking and verifying compute usage. Such IDs could also be useful for linking AI agents back to the physical infrastructure on which they are deployed, in order to provide an additional layer of oversight. What are some promising technical approaches for implementing secure IDs that are sufficiently robust against hardware and software-level attacks? How can ID creation, provisioning, and tracking be handled in a way that makes downstream policy measures maximally easy (e.g. chip tracking for anti-smuggling)?

Timothy Fist has worked with a variety of professionals spanning multiple fields.