Tech CEOs including Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are headed to Capitol Hill on Wednesday to participate in Sen. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer's first AI Insight Forum, giving lawmakers a chance to hear from the industry itself.
Lawmakers are trying to produce rules and guardrails around artificial intelligence, a booming technology that has raised questions about its potential to replace human workers and cause harm through misuse.
Schumer (D., N.Y.) said the inaugural forum, which is closed to the media, will be a candid debate about how Congress can tackle the opportunities and challenges of AI, and that the discussion will inform lawmakers as they draft legislation.
"We'll have AI advocates and critics, CEOs and unions, leading experts and researchers, all together in one room, talking about where Congress should start, what questions to ask, and how to build consensus for SAFE innovation," he said. "We'll need every sector of the workforce, every side of the political spectrum all part of the process if we are to succeed."
Schumer called for balanced and bipartisan action on AI that prioritizes innovations for everything from curing disease to making businesses more efficient to protecting security, but also prevents AI from going off track.
The 22 confirmed attendees for Wednesday's event make up a who's who in the booming AI sector, including Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, which shook up the industry after releasing its ChatGPT generative AI chat bot.
Other confirmed attendees include Microsoft (ticker: MSFT) CEO Satya Nadella, who has led the software maker's billions of dollars of investments in OpenAI, Nvidia $(NVDA)$ CEO Jensen Huang, Alphabet $(GOOGL)$ CEO Sundar Pichai, Tesla's $(TSLA)$ Musk, and Meta Platforms' (META) Zuckerberg. Labor leaders and academics are also on the attendee list.
Amazon.com $(AMZN)$ CEO Andy Jassy and Amazon Web Services CEO Adam Selipsky were invited but had scheduling conflicts.
Even as AI executives are asking lawmakers to regulate them, "there is not enough money and intellectual capital to ensure millions of algorithms are safe," Tom Siebel, CEO of C3.ai (AI) told MarketWatch. "They know it is impossible."
This isn't the first AI event this week on Capitol Hill. On Tuesday, a subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee heard testimony from Nvidia's chief scientist William Dally and Microsoft's vice chair and president Brad Smith.
Subcommittee co-leaders Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D., Conn.) and Sen. Josh Hawley (R., Mo.), have issued a one-page legislative framework for regulating AI, including registration and licensing requirements with an independent oversight agency for sophisticated AI models and export controls to limit the transfer of technology.
While supportive of new efforts to ensure AI is developed ethically and responsibly, Nvidia's Dally tried to calm fears associated with the unforeseen consequences of AI.
"Fortunately, uncontrollable artificial general intelligence is science fiction, not reality," Dally said. "We humans will always decide how much decision-making power to cede to AI models. The AI models will never seize power by themselves."
Separately, a subcommittee of the Senate Commerce and Science Committee held a hearing on how AI companies can be more transparent and improve public trust.
Also on Tuesday, the Biden Administration secured commitments from eight more big-name companies to make artificial intelligence safe.
Adobe (ticker: ADBE), Nvidia, Palantir $(PLTR)$, Salesforce $(CRM)$, and IBM ( IBM) joined others who have pledged "to help advance the development of safe, secure and trustworthy AI," the White House said.
Cohere, Scale AI, and Stability also made the commitment. Seven others, including Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft, agreed to the guidelines in July.
Those who join the initiative agree to ensure products are safe before making them public, put security first, and earn the public's trust. They also agreed to share information on the potential dangers from AI and develop ways to let people know when content is AI-generated.
