The White House invited executives from advanced companies in artificial intelligence (AI), such as Google, Microsoft, OpenAi and Anthropic, to attend a meeting this Thursday “discussion about ‘the risks’ associated with this technology with various members of the Government, among them Vice President Kamala Harris.
“Our goal is to have a candid discussion of current and near-term risks that we perceive in the developments of AI”, says the invitation.
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The government also seeks to discuss “steps to reduce those risks, and other ways we can work together to make sure Americans benefit of AI advances while shielded from danger”
Satya Nadella (Microsoft), Sundar Pichai (Google), Sam Altman (OpenAI) and Dario Amodei (Anthropic) confirmed their participation, according to the White House.
The artificial intelligence has been present in everyday life for yearsfrom social media recommendation algorithms to high-end home appliances.
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However, the dazzling success since late last year of ChatGPT, the generative AI interface from OpenAI, a startup company heavily funded by Microsoft, was the starting point for a race towards increasingly intuitive and efficient systems, that are capable of generating texts, images and increasingly complex programming codes.
Its launch sparked excitement and concerns on a new scale. Especially when Sam Altman, the director of OpenAI, anticipated the next generation of so-called “general” AIwhere programs will be “smarter than humans in general”.
(Read: ChatGPT’s AI Is The Biggest Tech Advance In Decades, According To Bill Gates)
White House announces an independent commitment from leading AI labs like Anthropic, Google, Hugging Face, Microsoft, NVIDIA, OpenAI, and Stability AI, to participate in a public evaluation of AI systems on an evaluation platform developed by Scale AI. https://t.co/6JjDrLFRlb
— Seb Krier (@sebkrier) May 4, 2023
Latent risks of Artificial Intelligence
The AI risks they range from discrimination by algorithms to the automation of tasks carried out by humans, theft of intellectual property or sophisticated disinformation on a large scale, among others.
“Language models capable of generating images, sound and video are a dream come true for those who want to destroy democracieswarned UC Berkeley professor David Harris, a specialist in public policy and AI.
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In late 2022, the White House released a “Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights,” a short document listing general principles such as protection against dangerous systems or fallible.
Earlier this year, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), a government-affiliated center, designed an AI-related “risk management framework.”
President Biden said last month that these companies “clearly (…) they must ensure that their products are safe before making them available to the general public,” the invitation reads.
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However, “these guidelines and statements do not obligate affected companies to do anything,” said David Harris, who was director of AI research at Meta
Businesses recognize threats
The AI giants do not deny that there are risks, but they fear that innovation will be stifled by laws that are too restrictive.
“I’m sure AI will be used by malicious actors, and yes, it will cause damage,” Microsoft chief economist Michael Schwarz said during a panel at the World Economic Forum in Geneva on Wednesday, according to Bloomberg.
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But he asked lawmakers not to rush it and when there is “real damage” to make sure that “the benefits of regulation outweigh the price to society.
“The last time we faced such a social upheaval because of the technologies it was at the beginning of web 2.0, in the years 2002,” said Lina Khan, president of the Federal Trade Commission, the US consumer protection agency, on Wednesday.
On the other side of the Atlantic, Europe hopes to lead the way again towards ad-hoc regulation around AI, as it already did with personal data law.
AFP
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