Mr. Sam Goes to Washington

And gets OpenAI’s job done.

Sam Altman was in DC in front of Congress on Tuesday.

By all measures, Sam Altman leveraged his position as the Uber-representative of AI into an uncharacteristically warm reception in DC. 

WHAT WAS NOTABLE:

The visit Tuesday, was in stark contrast to any recent US Tech Founder/CEOs who found themselves under the glare of Members of Congress in both parties, eagerly pursuing TV attention. And certainly night and day compared to the bipartisan grilling received by TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew back in March.

From standing room demos of GPT4 by Sam to dozens of legislators, to gushing advice by a Republican Senator (John Kennedy, LA), advising Sam to get a lawyer or an agent (or both), when he learned Sam doesn’t have any stock in OpenAI. 

There were other two AI luminaries at the hearing lest we forget,

“The wide-ranging discussion that lasted about two hours came ahead of Altman’s first time testifying before Congress at a Senate Judiciary subcommittee on privacy and technology hearing on Tuesday. IBM Chief Privacy and Trust Officer Christina Montgomery and New York University Professor Emeritus Gary Marcus also testified at the hearing, which is focused on AI oversight.”

Notable was Sam Altman’s call inviting AI Regulation, and his recommendation to require LICENSING of AI innovations by the government, preferably by a dedicated Agency.

“The US should consider creating a new regulatory body to oversee the licensing and use of AI “above a certain threshold,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in Congressional testimony yesterday.

“We think that regulatory intervention by governments will be critical to mitigate the risks of increasing powerful models,” he continued. “For example, the US government might consider a combination of licensing and testing requirements for development and release of AI models above a threshold of capabilities.”

Altman suggested the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which inspects nuclear weapons development programs, as a model for how a future AI regulatory body could function. 

Geoffrey Hinton, one of the main developers of the neural networks at the heart of today’s powerful AI models, recently compared AI to nuclear weapons.”

This did meet some bipartisan support on the panel, and some disagreement from his fellow AI luminaries

“Even some Republicans, who usually eschew expanding the federal government, appeared on board. Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina likened A.I. to a nuclear reactor that needs an operating license and regular testing. When Christina Montgomery, IBM’s chief privacy and trust officer and another witness, suggested that a new agency wasn’t needed, Graham pushed back: “I don’t understand how you could say that we don’t need an agency to deal with the most transformative technology, maybe ever,” he said.”

Sam Altman’s splashy debut in Washington On Tuesday was in contrast with the low-key rollout of Google’s AI Regulatory position on Friday by Kent Walker, President of Global Affairs. No mention of licensing terms by the government to be found. Or of singular AI regulatory agencies 

All this is of course is in sharp contrast to the developments in Europe’s  impending AI Act, which continued to make headway this week. It’s anti-US AI and Open Source AI initiatives were of note:

“In a bold stroke, the EU’s amended AI Act would ban American companies such as OpenAI, Amazon, Google, and IBM from providing API access to generative AI models.  The amended act, voted out of committee on Thursday, would sanction American open-source developers and software distributors, such as GitHub, if unlicensed generative models became available in Europe.  While the act includes open source exceptions for traditional machine learning models, it expressly forbids safe-harbor provisions for open source generative systems.

Any model made available in the EU, without first passing extensive, and expensive, licensing, would subject companies to massive fines of the greater of €20,000,000 or 4% of worldwide revenue.  Opensource developers, and hosting services such as GitHub – as importers – would be liable for making unlicensed models available. The EU is, essentially, ordering large American tech companies to put American small businesses out of business – and threatening to sanction important parts of the American tech ecosystem.”

All this is of course subject to change as these provisions move through the EU legislative process, but it does all bear watching. 

Unlike, previous major tech cycles around the Internet, Cloud, Mobile, and other innovations, AI remains the one cycle with the highest fears and potential regulatory headwinds from the beginning. Stay tuned.