Generative artificial intelligence has rapidly evolved into one of the most influential technologies shaping modern communication, digital expression, and global information exchange. It now supports content creation, recommendation systems, creative tools, and automated decision making across a wide range of consumer and enterprise products. Among global digital platforms adopting generative AI technologies are major social media services such as TikTok, operated by ByteDance. At this scale of digital adoption, generative AI systems influence how information is discovered, how culture spreads, and how communities interact, making safety, reliability, and accountability central concerns rather than secondary considerations.
Cheong previously worked on safety related initiatives within this broader social media technology landscape, including experience at platforms such as TikTok under ByteDance. In these environments, generative AI adoption has amplified both opportunity and risk, raising industry wide concerns related to misinformation, harmful content, and policy compliance. While these technologies can enhance creativity and operational efficiency, they also raise concerns related to misinformation, harmful content propagation, policy compliance, and unintended model behavior. As a result, the governance of generative AI has become a critical priority for platforms operating at global scale.
Within this evolving landscape, Chong Lam Cheong has built a career focused on turning abstract principles of AI governance into operational practice. Before entering the field of generative AI, he worked in safety related roles in transportation and telecommunications. Those experiences gave him a strong sense of how complex systems can fail and why formal safety processes matter. As a GenAI Safety Product Manager, he now applies this mindset to large scale AI deployments. He collaborates with engineers, data scientists, policy specialists, and security teams to design systems that evaluate how models behave in the real world. His work is not only about making models more capable. It is also about making sure that they act in a way that is safe and predictable for the communities that depend on them.
Cheong often describes measurement as the starting point for any serious safety effort. If an organization cannot measure how often a model hallucinates, how frequently it generates unsafe content, or how reliably it follows policy rules, then it cannot credibly claim to be governing that model.
“Measurement is what turns AI safety from a principle into a practice,” Cheong said. “If you cannot systematically observe how a model behaves, you cannot responsibly deploy it at scale.” Guided by this view, he has helped to create a unified safety evaluation platform that supports large scale testing of generative models. The platform runs thousands of test prompts, records the model outputs, and scores them using a library of safety and quality metrics. It looks at hallucination rates, accuracy on factual questions, compliance with content policies, and alignment with user intent. The system also supports repeated testing so that teams can see how model behavior changes as they update training data or adjust model parameters.
The evaluation platform is only one part of a broader governance toolkit. Cheong has contributed to the design of safety metrics that can be shared across technical and non technical teams. These metrics include precision and recall for safety classification, rejection and over blocking rates, and measures of safety leakage. By relying on a common set of indicators, engineering teams, policy groups, and executives can have more focused discussions about tradeoffs. A shared language is essential when organizations must decide whether a model is ready to be deployed in a sensitive context such as education, finance, or health information.
Another area of Cheong’s work involves training data governance. Generative models learn patterns from enormous datasets that may contain sensitive, biased, or harmful information. If these risks are not addressed at the data level, they can reappear in model outputs in unexpected ways. To mitigate this problem, Cheong has helped shape workflows that scan training corpora for problematic content, filter out high risk material, and document data provenance. This can include automated classifiers as well as human review for borderline cases. These practices align with emerging expectations from regulators and from civil society organizations that are watching how companies build and train their models.
Once a model is deployed, real time monitoring becomes critical. Cheong has helped to develop safety observability systems that track how models perform after release. These systems collect signals from user interactions, synthetic probing, and human review. They display trends on dashboards that highlight spikes in unsafe outputs, shifts in model behavior, or new failure patterns that did not appear during pre release testing. When an issue is detected, the system can trigger deeper investigation or immediate interventions such as tightening filters, updating guardrail logic, or rolling back a recent configuration change. This approach reflects lessons learned from other fields such as site reliability engineering and cybersecurity, where continuous monitoring is now standard practice.
Cheong has also worked on safeguards for large language models and for models that generate or interpret images and video. These safeguards can include classifier layers that assess whether an output violates content policies, response shaping techniques that guide the model toward safer alternatives, and escalation paths where sensitive queries are handled through human review instead of full automation. In some cases, the system may decline to respond and instead explain that a request cannot be fulfilled under current safety rules. These defensive mechanisms are designed to protect both users and organizations from harmful outcomes.
Industry observers note that this type of work is increasingly important for companies that wish to operate in multiple jurisdictions and in sectors where trust is central to adoption. Regulators are beginning to ask more detailed questions about how AI systems are tested, how frequently they are audited, and what processes exist to correct harmful behavior. Organizations that have invested in robust safety infrastructure are better positioned to answer these questions, to win contracts in regulated industries, and to maintain public confidence over time.
Cheong views these developments not as obstacles to innovation but as conditions for sustainable progress. In his view, systems that are transparent, measurable, and accountable are more likely to earn long term acceptance from users and regulators. He also believes that collaboration is essential. Engineers, product managers, ethicists, domain experts, and policymakers each see different aspects of the problem. When they work together, they can design governance frameworks that are both realistic and principled, combining technical insight with social responsibility.
As generative AI continues to spread into new areas of life, from creative tools and customer service systems to decision support in critical domains, the importance of responsible governance will only increase. The work of practitioners like Chong Lam Cheong shows that safety is not an abstract ideal, but a practical discipline that can be built into products through thoughtful design, careful measurement, and ongoing oversight. In that sense, responsible AI is no longer a separate project. It has become a core requirement for any technology that aims to operate at scale and to serve people in a reliable way.
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