The tone of congressional hearings involving tech industry executives in recent years can best be described as antagonistic. Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and other tech luminaries have all been dressed down on Capitol Hill by lawmakers upset with their companies.
But on Tuesday, Sam Altman, the chief executive of the San Francisco start-up OpenAI, testified before members of a Senate sub-committee hearing and largely agreed with them on the need to regulate the increasingly powerful AI technology being created inside his company and others like Google and Microsoft.
The boyish-looking Altman traded in his usual pullover sweater and jeans for a blue suit and tie as he offered a loose framework to manage what happens next with the fast-developing systems that some believe could fundamentally change the economy.
In his first testimony before Congress, Altman implored lawmakers to regulate artificial intelligence as members of the committee displayed an understanding of the technology, underscoring the deep unease felt by technologists and the government over AI’s potential harms.
“I think if this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong. And we want to be vocal about that,” he said. “We want to work with the government to prevent that from happening.”
Altman made his public debut on Capitol Hill as interest in AI has exploded. Tech giants have poured billions of dollars and effort into what they say is a transformative technology, even amid rising concerns about AI’s role in spreading misinformation, killing jobs and one-day matching human intelligence.
That has thrust the technology into the spotlight in Washington. President Biden this month said at a meeting with a group of chief executives of AI companies that “what you’re doing has enormous potential and enormous danger.” Top leaders in Congress have also promised AI regulations.
The appearance of Altman, a 38-year-old Stanford University dropout and tech entrepreneur, was his christening as the leading figure in AI He was joined at the hearing by an executive from IBM and a well-known professor and frequent critic of AI technology,
Altman said his company’s technology may destroy some jobs but also create new ones, and that it will be important for the “government to figure out how we want to mitigate that”. He proposed the creation of an agency that issues licences for the creation of large-scale AI models, safety regulations and tests that AI models must pass before being released to the public.
“We believe that the benefits of the tools we have deployed so far vastly outweigh the risks, but ensuring their safety is vital to our work,” Altman said.
But after nearly two hours of questioning in Tuesday’s hearing, it was unclear how lawmakers would respond to the call to regulate AI Lawmakers were generally friendly towards Altman.
New York Times News Service
