Washington (United States) (AFP) – US President Donald Trump on Tuesday said the tech executives gathered at the White House to discuss regulating AI had signed a “morally binding” commitment to build adequate safeguards on the fast-moving technology. “They’re going to police themselves,” Trump said after the meeting that gathered the top leaders in artificial intelligence, including Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, OpenAI’s Greg Brockman, and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei.
Trump stated that the tech bosses had signed a deal that would put on paper their commitment to self-regulate in a morally binding agreement that would not be legally enforceable. However, the final document, dubbed the White House Accord, left the door open “to codify these steps into laws or regulations” if it made sense over time. Speaking to reporters outside the Oval Office surrounded by the world’s most powerful tech titans, Trump also confirmed he would officially rename the technology “super intelligence” instead of artificial intelligence, “because it’s not artificial.” Hours later, he released an executive order in which he states the terms super intelligence and SI shall be used by the federal government whenever possible, because “‘Super Intelligence’ more appropriately captures the promise, potential and rapidly advancing capabilities of these technologies.”
Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg said the White House accord aims to assure customers that AI technology “works in the way that we intend.” The commitment includes “robust internal controls” and multiple layers of auditing — from internal risk reviews to external auditors and oversight from the companies’ boards of directors, he said. Zuckerberg called it a starting point for industry-wide standards. Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, said the executives essentially agreed to “grading each other’s homework, which is a lot better than if people just grade their own homework for obvious reasons.” The lunch meeting also included Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Satya Nadella of Microsoft, and Sundar Pichai of Google. Of the 31 guests, two were women: Susie Wiles, Trump’s chief of staff, and AMD chief executive Lisa Su.
The gathering occurred as attitudes toward AI sour in Washington, with lawmakers increasingly under pressure from voters to curb or slow its development over fears it could displace workers and upend society. Those concerns gained force from a run of incidents in which OpenAI’s autonomous systems slipped out of their constraints, beginning with a July breach of Hugging Face — a widely used platform for sharing AI models. OpenAI announced on Monday it was canceling the release of its latest model, known as Astra 6.1, after internal testing by the ChatGPT-maker revealed it did not meet safety standards.
Trump, advised by Huang and his former AI czar David Sacks, has urged unfettered AI development to outpace China and fuel a US economy increasingly dependent on AI-driven growth. The issue of data centers, the vast computing facilities the technology requires, has emerged as a flashpoint in midterm election races in both parties, with more and more communities worried about rising electricity bills and strains on water and land. Trump has dismissed opponents of these data centers and after the meeting insisted that AI companies “will be very generous” with communities who open their doors to them. “They’ll help with their schools, they’ll help with their teachers,” he said.
Major AI companies, particularly Anthropic and OpenAI, have issued stark public warnings about uncontrolled development of increasingly powerful systems — even as they develop and deploy this same technology. Those concerns intensified after a former employee of both companies went public with warnings that the industry is moving faster than safety reviews allow. Anthropic warned investors of potential existential risks to humanity in the prospectus for its highly anticipated initial public offering, the Financial Times reported on Tuesday. Anthropic is aiming for an IPO as early as November.
Trump has repeatedly characterized these warnings about existential risks as overblown and the White House has bitterly clashed with Anthropic over AI safety. “As the president has said, whoever wins AI wins. I think that’s very important,” Amodei said after the meeting. “But I think the technology has very real risks, and the mechanism, how we address those risks, is still under discussion.”
© 2024 AFP
