The season for putting pen to paper and writing essays about AI policy is in full swing. Fresh off Jensen Huang sharing an open letter supporting open source last week, and the quasi-response from Anthropic's Dario Amodei, a pair of fresh missives made the rounds Tuesday.
The first was a
petition signed by some 1,100 AI industry insiders from companies including OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic (including CEO Amodei) calling for an international framework to "pace" the development of AI. The risk of AI capabilities accelerating "beyond our ability to understand or control the resulting systems" is real, the group said. As such, the letter's signatories requested "that the U.S. government support an international effort to develop the technical and governance tools needed to deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development."
The letter was short on specific details for what such a governance framework would look like, but getting the conversation started seems to have been the goal.
On the other end of the spectrum, Meta CEO
Mark Zuckerberg published a treatise in the
Wall Street Journal on Tuesday warning against the "extreme concentration of power" in AI.
While "more coordination between governments and other institutions" may be appropriate to deal with special cases like "biological risks," Zuckerberg argued that most AI risks—including cybersecurity—are better addressed by ensuring widespread access to open source tools.
"If only a handful of institutions have superintelligence, they will inevitably exercise a controlling influence over economics, science and politics. Even with the best intentions, that concentration would limit people’s ability to choose their own future," he wrote.
Food for thought. At least until the next CEO weighs in.
—AO