OpenAI CEO Sam Altman will make his congressional debut on May 16 to discuss artificial intelligence (AI) regulation in the United States at an overview hearing. Also present to testify were Christina Montgomery, IBM's chief privacy and trust officer - a member of the US Nation al Advisory Council on Artificial Intelligence - and Gary Marcus, a professor emeritus at New York University. Details about the hearing's agenda remain scant. Its title, "Oversight of AI: The Rules of AI," suggests that the discussions will center on security and privacy , as will the scheduled roster of attendees.
The hearing marked Altman's first official testimony before Congress, though he recently participated in a roundtable discussion with Vice President Kamala Harris at the White House, along with the CEOs of Alphabet, Microsoft and Anthropic. NYU's Marcus recently made waves in the AI community by f ully supporting a six-month "pause" in community-driven AI development.
The idea of an AI moratorium was defined in an open letter posted on the Future of Life Institute website on March 22. As of publication of this article, it has more than 27,500 signatures. The stated goal of the letter is to "call for an immediate moratorium on all AI labs for at least 6 months to train AI systems more powerful than GPT-4." Altman and Montgomery were among those opposed to the suspension.
For her part, Montgomery explained her perspective in an in-depth IBM corporate blog post titled "Don't Pause AI Development, Prioritize Ethics," in which she makes the case for a more precise approach to AI regulation:
"A blanket moratorium on AI training, combined with existing trends that appear to deprioritize investment in industry's AI ethics efforts, will only lead to more harm and frustration." According to another IBM blog post, written in part by Montgomery, the company believes AI should be regulated based on risk — notably, IBM does not currently have any public-facing generative AI models to Cointelegraph's knowledge.
OpenAI, on the other hand, is responsible for ChatGPT, arguably the most popular public-facing AI technology in existence.
According to an interview with Lex Fridman at the MIT event, Altman supports the safe and ethical development of AI systems, but believes in "getting everyone involved in the discussion" and "getting these systems out into the world."
That leaves Marcus as the lone outlier, who has been a vocal proponent of the suspension since it was first brought up. While Marcus admits to having "no hand in drafting" the pause letter, he did write a blog post titled "Is it Time to Hit AI's Pause Button?" nearly a month before the open letter was published. While the upcoming Senate hearings may simply be forums for members of Congress to ask questions, the discussions could have damaging consequences -- depending on which experts you trust.
If Congress decides to get tough on AI regulation, experts like Montgomery worry that such efforts could have a chilling effect on innovation without necessarily addressing safety concerns. This compromise could permeate the operations where GPT technology underpins the vast array of bots and services. For example, in the fintech space, cryptocurrency exchanges are adopting chatbot technology to serve their customers, conduct transactions and analyze the market.
Yet experts such as Marcus and Elon Musk worry that failure to enact what they see as commonsense policies related to AI regulation could lead to an existential crisis for humanity.
