The Biden administration officials are divided over how aggressively to regulate new artificial intelligence (AI) tools — and their differences are playing out this week in Sweden at the US-EU Trade and Technology Council gathering. Some White House and Commerce Department officials support the strong measures proposed by the European Union for AI products such as ChatGPT and Dall-E, while some US national security officials and those in the State Department say aggressively regulating this nascent technology will put the nation at a competitive disadvantage. This has left the US without a coherent response to the EU’s plan to subject generative AI, such as ChatGPT, to additional rules. With Congress unlikely to pass binding rules for AI, the European bloc will be the first to dictate how tech giants such as Microsoft and Google owner Alphabet develop the foundation models that underpin the next frontier of AI.
ChatGPT is an AI-based language model developed by OpenAI, designed to converse with people and generate text. Dall-E is an AI tool that generates images from text prompts.
Michelle Giuda is the Director of the Krach Institute for Tech Diplomacy and a former Assistant Secretary of State for Global Public Affairs in the Biden administration. She said strengthening trust between allies to foster innovation and keep ahead of China’s advancements is one of the fundamental tasks for the Trade and Technology Council.
Sam Altman is the CEO of OpenAI, a US-based company that has created ChatGPT. He became the public face of corporate concern over regulatory overreach when he suggested his company could pull products from the European market if the rules were too difficult to follow.
