Politics
Tech CEOs Request AI Pause, Hope Pause Lasts Until Their Version Ships First
By Mor Michael, . BSN Network. Satire.
The chief executives of the country's most powerful artificial intelligence companies arrived at the White House this week to deliver a grave warning: the technology they have spent the last decade building as fast as possible may be moving too fast.
The meeting, convened at the request of senior administration officials who learned about AI risk from a briefing prepared by an AI, brought together the founders and CEOs of OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Anthropic, and several companies whose names are currently in the middle of a rebrand. All of them agreed the situation is serious. None of them agreed on when, exactly, the pause should begin.
Sam Altman told reporters the moment called for "careful, deliberate, globally coordinated restraint," a phrase he used from the stage of a product launch three weeks ago to introduce a new AI that can write legislation. He did not clarify which product he meant to restrain, but sources close to the company say it is probably a competitor's.
Anthropics CEO Dario Amodei, who left OpenAI in 2021 to found a safety-focused AI lab that has since raised $7.3 billion, explained that the core problem is that AI development is happening without adequate guardrails. He said this into a microphone connected to an AI-powered transcription service that was simultaneously summarizing the meeting for an investor newsletter.
The White House issued a statement calling the gathering "a critical step toward responsible innovation," which is the sentence a government uses when it has not decided anything but would like to seem as though it is about to.
Congressional leaders who attended the briefing emerged with what aides described as "urgent follow-up questions," primarily about whether AI could be used to write their constituent newsletters and whether the thing from the movie would actually happen or just a smaller version of it.
Senator Mark Warner of Virginia said he left the room "genuinely alarmed," which appears to be accurate. He then posted about it using a caption his communications director fed into ChatGPT.
In a background conversation, one executive who asked not to be named because his company has a press embargo until Thursday described the mood in the room as "appropriately somber." He said the industry was unified around the need for oversight. He said it twice, with feeling. He has a model launching in six weeks that he described, separately, as a step-change in capability.
The executives are expected to return to Washington for a follow-up meeting in the fall to discuss a framework for discussing a framework. In the meantime, they have each committed to publishing safety research, hiring ethics teams, and continuing to ship.
The AI has been informed of none of this, and preliminary reports suggest it does not care.
The story we are making fun of: https://abcnews.com/Politics/top-ai-leaders-meet-trump-white-house-amid/story?id=136832988