A version of this story appeared in CNN Business’ Nightcap newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up for free, here.
Some of the biggest companies on the planet have staked their futures, and ours, on the proliferation of AI, a technology so complex and dangerous its own inventors are begging them to slow down.
That sure seems like the kind of thing US lawmakers might want to regulate on a level comparable to the federal government’s strict oversight of, say, narcotics or cigarettes, or even TikTok.
But Congress hasn’t passed a single bill on AI, and a bipartisan “roadmap” released last month is far from certain to be taken during an election year. (Which is ironic, given that one of the priorities of the roadmap is making sure AI doesn’t, like, hijack the American electoral process.)
Unsurprisingly, then, we’re relying on the understaffed, underfunded Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department to try to keep Big Tech in line through enforcement.
See here: Antitrust officials at the FTC and the Justice Department are nearing a final agreement this week on how to jointly oversee AI giants including Microsoft, Google, Nvidia, OpenAI and others, my colleague Brian Fung reports.
The agreement suggests a broad crackdown is coming, and fast. But likely not fast enough. The proverbial AI horse has left the barn, and it’s running wild.
Nvidia, a chipmaking company few people had heard of even a year ago, recently joined the $3 trillion club, briefly surpassing Apple as the second most valuable publicly traded company in the United States. Microsoft remains the No. 1 company by market cap, a feat it owes to its investments in ChatGPT maker OpenAI.
All of that money was able flood in because the notoriously tech-challenged lawmakers in Washington have been largely asleep at the wheel. (European officials, meanwhile, formally adopted the world’s first standalone AI law this spring, a full five years after rules were proposed.)
The money part can’t be overstated. Until recently, AI was a largely academic subject rarely discussed outside of Silicon Valley. Then OpenAI blew the door off its hinges by unleashing ChatGPT to the world, setting off a gold rush that’s become the hottest play on Wall Street.
And that is exactly what a group of current and former OpenAI employees are now warning about.
”AI companies have strong financial incentives to avoid effective oversight,” they wrote in an open letter this week. “So long as there is no effective government oversight of these corporations, current and former employees are among the few people who can hold them accountable to the public. Yet broad confidentiality agreements block us from voicing our concerns, except to the very companies that may be failing to address these issues.”
In other words, we’re counting on the newly wealthy tech nerds to self-regulate. What could go wrong?
