The White House on Thursday pressed Silicon Valley chief executives to limit the risks of artificial intelligence, the most prominent effort by the administration to confront growing questions and demands to regulate the fast-developing technology.
For more than an hour so far in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, Vice President Kamala Harris and other officials briefed the leaders. Google, Microsoft, Open AIcreator of the popular ChatGPT chatbot, and Bushra, an AI startup, that they have a responsibility to take concerns about the technology seriously. President Biden also stopped the meeting for a short time, the administration said.
It was the first gathering of major White House chief executives since the launch of tools like ChatGPT, which captivated the public and supercharged the race for technology dominance.
“The private sector has a moral, ethical and legal responsibility to ensure the safety and security of its products,” Ms Harris said in a statement. “And every company must comply with existing laws to protect the American people.”
The meeting, which is still taking place, highlights how the AI boom has confounded the highest levels of the US government and put pressure on governments around the world to manage the technology. Ever since OpenAI released ChatGPT to the public last year, many of the world’s biggest tech companies have rushed to incorporate chatbots into their products. Accelerated AI research. Venture capitalists have poured billions of dollars into AI startups.
But the AI explosion has also raised concerns about how the technology could transform economies, shake up geopolitics and bolster criminal activity. Critics have expressed concern that powerful AI systems are too vague, with the potential to discriminate, displace people from jobs, spread misinformation and perhaps break the law themselves.
Even some of the creators of AI have warned against the consequences of the technology. This week, Jeffrey Hinton, a leading researcher known as the “Godfather” of AI, Resigned from Google. So that he can talk openly about the dangers of technology.
Mr. Biden said recently that it “remains to be seen” whether AI is dangerous, and some of his top appointees have promised to intervene if the technology is used in harmful ways. Members of Congress, Including Senator Chuck Schumer New York’s majority leader has also proposed drafting or proposing legislation to regulate AI.
The pressure to regulate technology has been felt in many places around the world. Lawmakers in the European Union are negotiating AI rules, and there is pressure for those rules to cover chatbots like ChatGPT. In China, authorities have recently demanded that AI systems adhere to strict censorship laws.
“Europe is certainly not sitting still and neither is China,” said Tom Wheeler, former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. “There is as much first-mover advantage in policy as there is first-mover advantage in the marketplace.”
Mr Wheeler said all eyes were on what the US could do. “We have to make sure we are at the table as players,” he said. “Everybody’s first reaction is, ‘What is the White House going to do?'”
Google chief executive Sundar Pichai was among the participants in Thursday’s meeting. Microsoft chief Satya Nadella; Sam Altman of OpenAI; and Dario Amudi, chief executive of Anthropic.
Google, Microsoft and OpenAI declined to comment ahead of the White House meeting. Anthropic confirmed that the company will participate.
“The president has been extensively briefed on ChatGPT and knows how it works,” White House press secretary, Krane Jean-Pierre, said at Thursday’s briefing.
Hours before the meeting, the White House announced that the National Science Foundation plans to spend $140 million on new research centers dedicated to AI, with the administration also promising to release draft guidelines for government agencies to To ensure that their use of AI protects the rights of the American people. and security,” he said, adding that several AI companies had agreed to make their products available for testing at a cybersecurity conference in August.
The White House had indicated before the meeting that it wanted to impress upon companies to deal with the risks of new AI developments.
“Our goal is to talk openly about the risks we each see in current and near-term AI development, steps to mitigate those risks and other ways we can work together to “To ensure that the American people can benefit from advances in AI does harm,” said Aarti Prabhakar, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, in an invitation to the meeting obtained by The New York Times.
The meeting and announcements build on earlier attempts by the administration to guardrail AI.
Last year, the White House released what it called a blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights, which said automated systems should protect the privacy of users’ data, protect them from discriminatory outcomes and clarify Why some measures were taken? In January, the Commerce Department also released a framework for mitigating risk in AI development, which had been in the works for years.
But concrete steps to rein in the technology in the country may be more likely to come first from law enforcement agencies in Washington.
A group of government agencies pledged in April to “oversee the development and use of automated systems and promote responsible innovation,” while punishing violations of the law by using the technology.
In a guest article in The Times on Wednesday, Lena Khan, head of the Federal Trade Commission, The nation said With AI at a “critical decision point”, he likened recent developments in the technology to the birth of tech giants such as Google and Facebook, and warned that, without proper regulation, the technology could become one of the biggest. Tech can take the power of companies and make scammers vulnerable. A powerful tool.
“As the use of AI becomes more widespread, government officials have a responsibility to ensure that this hard-learned history does not repeat itself,” he said.
Katie Rogers Cooperation reporting.
