For just over two years, technology leaders at the forefront of developing artificial intelligence had made an unusual request of lawmakers. They wanted Washington to regulate them.
The tech executives warned lawmakers that generative A.I., which can produce text and images that mimic human creations, had the potential to disrupt national security and elections, and could eventually eliminate millions of jobs.
A.I. could go “quite wrong,” Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, testified in Congress in May 2023. “We want to work with the government to prevent that from happening.”
But since President Trump’s election, tech leaders and their companies have changed their tune, and in some cases reversed course, with bold requests of government to stay out of their way, in what has become the most forceful push to advance their products.
In recent weeks, Meta, Google, OpenAI and others have asked the Trump administration to block state A.I. laws and to declare that it is legal for them to use copyrighted material to train their A.I. models. They are also lobbying to use federal data to develop the technology, as well as for easier access to energy sources for their computing demands. And they have asked for tax breaks, grants and other incentives.
The shift has been enabled by Mr. Trump, who has declared that A.I. is the nation’s most valuable weapon to outpace China in advanced technologies.
Posted by John3262005
3 Comments
Night City 2077 here we come.
Them asking for regulation was asking for market intervention to protect themselves from competitors
I was always skeptical about AI alignment people because I always thought “AI would never drive humanity extinct because nobody would be stupid and evil enough to make an AI with any sort of incentive to kill and oppress people, that’s just stuff from movies”
And then Trump got elected and I learned that Peter Thiel has a company named “Palantir” that explicitly aims to make military and surveillance AI. So not only the country run explicitly by stupid evil people, but one of them owns a company that’s literally the least aligned goal possible for an AI. And it’s named after the crytal balls in the Lord of the Rings that are corrupted by evil influence and manipulate their users into either becoming evil or going insane. At this point I think reality is a shitty action movie.
Also Google removed their “don’t be evil” motto and got rid of their pledge not to use AI for military purposes. Clown world.