Elon Musk, Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg Discuss AI with Lawmakers in Washington - The New York Times
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Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai and others discussed artificial intelligence with lawmakers, as tech companies strive to influence potential regulations.
Elon Musk, left, of X, Tesla and SpaceX and Alex Karp of Palantir were among the tech leaders who met with lawmakers on Wednesday about artificial intelligence.
Elon Musk, left, of X, Tesla and SpaceX and Alex Karp of Palantir were among the tech leaders who met with lawmakers on Wednesday about artificial intelligence.Credit...Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times
Elon Musk, left, of X, Tesla and SpaceX and Alex Karp of Palantir were among the tech leaders who met with lawmakers on Wednesday about artificial intelligence.
Cecilia Kang
By Cecilia Kang
Reporting from Washington
Sept. 13, 2023
Elon Musk warned of civilizational risks posed by artificial intelligence. Sundar Pichai of Google highlighted the technology’s potential to solve health and energy problems. And Mark Zuckerberg of Meta stressed the importance of open and transparent A.I. systems.
The tech titans held forth on Wednesday in a three-hour meeting with lawmakers in Washington about A.I. and future regulations. The gathering, known as the A.I. Insight Forum, was part of a crash course for Congress on the technology and organized by the Senate leader, Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York.
The meeting — also attended by Bill Gates, a founder of Microsoft; Sam Altman of OpenAI; Satya Nadella of Microsoft; and Jensen Huang of Nvidia — was a rare congregation of more than a dozen top tech executives in the same room. It amounted to one of the industry’s most proactive shows of force in the nation’s capital as companies race to be at the forefront of A.I. and to be seen to influence its direction.
It was unclear if any concrete proposals would result from the meeting, the first of a series of such gatherings. But the tech executives took the opportunity to push for their agendas.
Mr. Karp of Palantir said he was able to deliver his message that the government should support A.I. in the defense sector, which includes his company’s main customers. “There was striking unanimity that America be the leader on A.I.,” he said in an interview.
Most of the executives agreed on the need for regulating A.I., which has been under scrutiny for its transformative and risky effects.
But there was still disagreement, attendees said. Mr. Zuckerberg highlighted open-source research and development of A.I., which means that the source code of the underlying A.I. systems are available to the public.
“Open source democratizes access to these tools, and that helps level the playing field and foster innovation for people and businesses,” he said.
Others, like Jack Clark of the A.I. start-up Anthropic and Mr. Gates, raised concerns that open-source A.I. could lead to security risks, attendees said. Anthropic, Google and OpenAI have said open source can allow outsiders to get past safety guardrails and spread misinformation and other toxic material.
Mr. Musk, who has called for a moratorium on the development of some A.I. systems even as he has pushed forward with his own A.I. initiatives, was among the most vocal about the risks. He painted an existential crisis posed by the technology.
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