GPT-3/Large Scale Language Model Business Insurance
One of the ideas I’ve been kicking around since last spring is this idea of insurance for businesses using GPT-3 models.
There are still safety risks of language models, even if they are fine tuned, for very sensitive domains such as mental health and vulnerable audiences like teenagers.
The idea is there could be a specific insurance provider which specializes in insurance for language model based businesses (and multimodal models in the future). Through their evolving actuary risk and financial models, they could evaluate the risks of a GPT-3 application and offer insurance coverage for businesses in the space.
Safety concerns of this magnitude are a very new proposition in many ways to the tech/software world, but this kind of real world risk evaluation is nothing new to the insurance industry. They are used to estimating, negotiating, and covering the mental health costs, physical damage, hospital bills, and legal fees for some of society’s worst events.
Although the industry goal should be to have 0 events happen, by partnering with the tech companies, the insurance companies could share detailed case data and work together with industry to bring the frequency of these incidents down overtime.
I’m not sure if existing business insurance policies - for things like general purpose and liability - are applicable to large language scale models like GPT-3. This puts businesses at risk. At the same time, having insurance options could make bigger businesses more willing to pilot GPT-3 in major commercial scenarios. It could also make everyday entrepreneurs more willing to take on risky (but important) GPT-3 applications that may have large societal benefits.
Maybe in the beginning, the insurance premiums could be really high, but as the actuarial models improve, perhaps, the costs could get so low a startup could afford it and benefit from some kind of insurance protection, peace of mind.
Just an idea, I thought it would be worth putting out there …
Update: January 26, 2022
I talked about this insurance idea more on last week’s podcast episode, I encourage you to check it out.