Several top tech companies that have already released products with powerful artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities have been called for a meeting at the White House Thursday. The meeting was chaired by Vice President Kamala Harris, which may have been due to her Bay Area ties. It involved Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei, and lasted over an hour in the White House’s Roosevelt Room. President Biden supposedly made a brief appearance in the meeting.
The attendees were informed that tech companies have a responsibility to ensure the safety and security of their products, abide by existing laws and protect their users. The meeting came in response to the growing unrest regarding AI and proposals to regulate it. It was the first time AI products, such as ChatGPT, Google’s Bard, and Microsoft’s Bing chatbot were discussed by the White House.
The issue is being addressed across the globe, with the European Union and China holding their own dialogues about the limitations of AI. China has been particularly anxious about digital censorship and the potential of AI bots to go against their laws.
Tom Wheeler, who previously served as the Federal Communication Commission’s Chairman, commented that the US could miss out on a first mover advantage. Meanwhile, Lina Kahn, the current Chair of the Federal Trade Commission pointed out that the government was not prepared for the rise of social media a decade ago, something that could happen again with AI.
At the end of the meeting, Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and Twitter, reinforced his plans to develop a new AI tool ‘TruthGPT’ with more emphasis on ethical and safety standards. He suggested welcoming regulation as a potential barrier to advanced AI endangering humanity.
OpenAI is an artificial intelligence research laboratory working towards ensuring that AI technology benefits all of humanity. Founded in 2015, the organization is supported by Founders Fund, Microsoft, Amplify Partners, Y Combinator and other major corporations. It is headquartered in San Francisco and led by co-founder and CEO Sam Altman. In 2016, they reached a major milestone by training AlphaGo, an AI program that beat world champion Lee Sedol at the game of Go. In 2020, they released the GPT-3, an AI tool for natural language processing, which has maintained its leading position in the industry.
