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On Wednesday, US Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) held an “AI Insight Forum” in the Senate office building about potential AI regulation. Attendees included billionaires and titans of modern industry such as Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang. But this massive corporate guest list — with 14 of the 22 CEOs — left some scratching their heads.
“This is the room you pull together when your employees want pictures with AI celebrities from the tech industry. This is not the room when you want to better understand what AI is, how (and for whom) it works, and what to do. That’s about it,” Signal president Meredith Whittaker wrote on X.
Others on the CEO-heavy list questioned the technical AI acumen of the attendees. “I hope to hear counterpoints from Schumer and many other technical people who are good at explaining technology,” said AI platform Hugging Face’s Dr. said Margaret Mitchell, whose CEO attended the meeting. “These CEOs are largely absent. And they are highly incentivized to obscure critical details, to the extent that they understand them.”
Mitchell also raised concerns about the lack of technically skilled women in the meeting. In all, seven of the 22 invitees were women, but not all of them held technical roles in AI, including representatives from the AFL-CIO and the Writers Guild. “Women are techie, but you wouldn’t know it from Schumer’s invitees — and that’s a big issue if we want to create AI regulation that helps AI work for everyone,” Mitchell said.
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Some senators also criticized the nature of the meeting. “I find it ridiculous that all these monopolists are here to tell senators how to shape the regulatory framework so they can make the most money,” said Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.).
Despite the controversy, the meeting generated bipartisan interest with more than 60 senators participating. Democratic Senate Majority Leader Schumer and Sen. Todd Young (R-Ind.) expressed optimism about the Senate’s readiness to consider the legislative proposals. However, Senator Mike Rounds (R-SD) pointed out that the process of drafting appropriate legislation will take time. “Are we ready to go out and write laws? Absolutely not,” Reuters quoted Rounds as saying. “We’re not there.”
While the meeting was closed to the media and public, Reuters and The New York Times reported on some of the discussions, which were held privately so that no one would “play with the press,” Schumer said.
According to Reuters, Musk argued for the need for “referees” in the AI space. He describes the regulation of AI like a sports game, where rules ensure fair play and protect participants. “It’s important for us to have referees to ensure that companies take actions that are safe and in the public interest,” Musk said.
The billionaire, who manages various tech ventures including social media platform X, framed the meeting as a “service to humanity” and suggested its results were “very important for the future of civilization in history”. Musk’s comments echoed his previous call for a six-month pause in the development of AI systems more powerful than OpenAI’s GPT-4, which some critics say ignores the current harm from AI in favor of unproven, hypothetical threats.
Meta’s Zuckerberg, on the other hand, sought a collaborative approach between the government and tech companies. He urged Congress to “engage with AI to support innovation and defense,” highlighting the strategic advantage of having American companies set global standards.
With the rapid rise of generative AI in the public eye over the past year—particularly related to the success of AI assistant ChatGPT and warnings about the potential dangers of hypothetical super-intelligent machines—artificial intelligence tools have fallen squarely in the US crosshairs of potential. Government regulation, of late, has drawn a lot of interest from Schumer and others in Congress. Last week, U.S. Senators Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and Hawley proposed a bipartisan legislative framework that would require companies working on “high-risk” AI applications, GPT-4, to obtain a government license.
As countries around the world scramble to set rules around facial recognition, deepfake, training data sets and more, the demand for AI regulation is becoming increasingly global. This week, the companies Adobe, IBM and Nvidia announced that they have joined President Joe Biden’s Voluntary AI Commitment, which mandates measures such as watermarking AI-generated content to flag its artificial origin.
There’s so much hype and so many dollars thrown around—industry experts like Mitchell worry that the technical details are getting lost in the conversation. “It’s best to first communicate with people who are technically skilled and can talk about people’s rights,” Mitchell said. “They could have built the foundation of Schumer’s understanding. Instead his foundation of understanding is now aligned to maximize short-term profits.”