(TND) — Seven major players in the artificial intelligence space have committed to a set of voluntary guidelines for safe and transparent development, the White House announced Friday.
President Joe Biden welcomed officials with Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Inflection, Meta, Microsoft and OpenAI as he spoke of the obligation these companies have in tapping into the immense promise of AI while doing all they can to minimize the immense risks.
“This is a serious responsibility, and we have to get it right,” Biden said.The president said we must be “clear-eyed and vigilant” about the dangers of emerging technologies, especially AI.
He called the commitments the companies are making “real and ... concrete.”
But he said this is just part of the work needed to police this transformative technology.
“We’ll see more technology change in the next 10 years, or even in the next few years, than we’ve seen in the last 50 years,” Biden said. “That has been an outstanding revelation to me, quite frankly.”
Friday’s meeting stems from the administration’s ongoing efforts to get its arms around AI, including a May meeting with the CEOs of Google, Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic.
The Biden administration previously released the Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights and the AI Risk Management Framework, intended to be guideposts to promote responsible innovation.
And they recently invested $140 million to stand up seven new National AI Research Institutes, which will make 25 such sites operating off half a billion dollars in funding.
The White House said Friday that it’s working on an executive order and will pursue bipartisan legislation focused on responsible innovation.
For their part, the seven companies are committing to internal and external security testing of their AI systems before they are released, sharing information, prioritizing security investments, developing methods to help people spot AI-generated content, and developing systems with the promise of tackling society’s greatest challenges.
Watermarking systems with AI-generated content, for example, can be used to earn the public’s trust, the White House said.
Those watermarks would be a “smart move,” said Patrick Hall, an AI expert and a visiting faculty member at the George Washington University School of Business.
Hall applauded these commitments as a “good small step” but said real regulations are needed to guard against the strong pull of commercial interests.
These companies, he said, are “under immense time (and) pressure to move fast and essentially move fast and break things – the good old-fashioned Facebook mantra with these generative AI technologies.”
But Hall questioned if the political will exists for AI regulations that really have teeth.
Another expert, Tony Dahbura, co-director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Assured Autonomy, previously told The National Desk that lawmakers are "absolutely not" ready to regulate fast-emerging AI technologies.
“Right now, we have too many people in positions of power saying, ‘I don't understand much about this technology stuff,’” Dahbura said in April.
“That's unacceptable,” he said.
Biden, in speaking to the press Friday, said social media has shown the harm that can come from powerful technologies without proper safeguards.
And Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., said at a May hearing with OpenAI's CEO that they needed to “write the rules of AI.”
Blumenthal brought up regrets about how they handled social media in its infancy.
He said a lack of early oversight on their behalf led to platforms where toxic content is spread and children are exploited.
These companies’ commitments came on the heels of a report from Bloomberg that a major tech player, Apple, is accelerating its efforts to catch up to the pack in generative AI development.
Arati Prabhakar, the president’s chief advisor for science and technology, said they have an “urgent focus” to shape the development of AI, “one of the most powerful technologies of our time.”
She said they hope to get commitments for responsible development from even more companies.
“Trust is fundamental,” she said. And trust will be critical for both the companies and the public as new AI products come to market.
There are still plenty of AI-related issues these new commitments don’t address, such as concerns over AI potentially displacing workers.
But Prabhakar said the White House is dedicated to ensuring all facets of AI development are done for the betterment of society.
“This doesn’t solve all the issues of AI, and so for some of these other issues, including some of the huge issues about how jobs are going to change and what the economic effects could be, those, for that, watch this space,” she said, “because there’s much more action underway.”
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