Biden welcomes CEOs of tech companies to the White House – 5/4/2023 – Tech

The Joe Biden government launched a new offensive on artificial intelligence (AI) this Thursday (4), with investments in new research centers dedicated to technology, on the same day that the president himself received leaders of major companies at the White House. involved in the sector.

“Our goal is to have a frank discussion about the risks each of us sees in current and near-term AI development, actions to mitigate those risks, and other ways we can work together to ensure the American people benefit from advances. of AI while being protected against its damage”, says the invitation sent to the CEOs of Google, Microsoft, OpenAI (from ChatGPT) and the startup Anthropic.

The expectation was that only the vice president, Kamala Harris, would meet with business leaders, but in the end Biden himself appeared, in addition to the head of the National Security Council, Jake Sullivan; the Secretary of Commerce, Gina Raimondo; and the director of the National Economic Council, Lael Brainard; in addition to other advisers.

On the business side, there were CEOs Sundar Pichai (Google), Satya Nadella (Microsoft), Sam Altman (OpenAI) and Dario Amodei (Antrhopic). The meeting lasted two hours.

“AI is one of the most powerful technologies today, with the potential to improve people’s lives and address some of society’s greatest challenges. At the same time, it has the potential to dramatically increase security threats, harm civil rights and privacy and undermine public trust and faith in democracy,” Kamala said in a statement after the meeting.

“The private sector has an ethical, moral and legal responsibility to ensure the safety of its products. And every business must comply with existing laws to protect the American people,” she said.

ChatGPT increased pressure on US to monitor AI

Since the launch of ChatGPT at the end of last year and with the rapid advancement of similar technologies from other companies, the US government has been under pressure to monitor the development of artificial intelligence. Congress promoted public hearings with scholars and companies in the field, and the Senate intends to hold new public sessions in panels in the coming weeks.

Biden’s team has seen a very practical application of artificial intelligence. On the same day that the Democratic president announced the campaign for re-election, the Republican Party launched a TV ad with images generated by artificial intelligence that show a doomsday scenario for the US if Biden is re-elected.

The piece depicts fictional AI-generated images of “an empowered China” invading Taiwan; Wall Street, New York’s financial heart, destroyed; soldiers at war on the border with Mexico; and the besieged city of San Francisco in the midst of an acute opioid crisis.

All propaganda images were generated by artificial intelligence, according to the party itself, including common technology problems, such as Biden and Kamala with many more teeth in their mouths and other people with deformed physical aspects.

Biden administration announces investments in AI

“As President Biden has emphasized, to reap the benefits of AI, we need to start by mitigating its risks,” a White House official said in conversation with journalists as he announced a new federal government investment of $140 million. in the creation of new research centers for the subject.

There will be 7 new National AI Research Institutes, which add to the 18 existing centers across the country, bringing the total to 25, which have funding of around US$ 500 million (R$ 2.5 billion).

The idea of ​​these centers is to develop the use of these technologies in higher education, industry, and government agencies, in addition to advancing research on ethics. The focus of development will be on critical areas such as climate, agriculture, energy, public health, education and cybersecurity, says the government.

The White House emphasizes that the action on artificial intelligence does not come from now, with a bill to protect the privacy of users and a framework from the Department of Commerce to reduce risks in the use of technology.

According to the US government, the main companies in the sector, including Nvidia, Hugging Face and Stability AI, have committed to making public assessments of the technology’s development, open to independent researchers and the general public.

In an article published on Wednesday (3) in The New York Times, the head of the US Federal Trade Commission, Lina Khan, argued that it is time to regulate technology because “the last time we find ourselves facing such a social change spread brought by technology was with Web 2.0 in the mid-2000s”, referring to the beginning of the so-called era of platforms, in which networks like Facebook and YouTube came to dominate what we call the internet.

During this period, what began as a revolutionary technology ended up as an extreme concentration of power in the hands of a few companies at an extraordinary cost to users’ privacy. With the advancement of AI, he argues, “authorities have a responsibility to ensure that history does not repeat itself.”

The regulation of artificial intelligence technologies is on the agenda in other countries. The “AI Law” is pending in the European Parliament, which establishes strict standards of transparency for technologies of the type used in strategic areas, such as infrastructure, education and law enforcement, and imposes a fine of up to 30 million euros or 6% of global turnover (whichever is greater) for those who do not comply with them.

In late April, ChatGPT created the option to turn off message history after the Italian data protection authority pressured OpenAI to conform to the country’s privacy standards, under penalty of banning the service. Bodies in France and Spain are also investigating whether text-generating AI violates their respective local regulations.