In a move that should surprise no one, tech leaders who gathered at closed-door meetings in Washington, DC, this week to discuss AI regulation with legislators and industry groups agreed on the need for laws governing generative AI technology. But they couldn’t agree on how to approach those regulations.
“The Democratic senator Chuck Schumer, who called the meeting ‘historic,’ said that attendees loosely endorsed the idea of regulations but that there was little consensus on what such rules would look like,” The Guardian reported. “Schumer said he asked everyone in the room — including more than 60 senators, almost two dozen tech executives, advocates and skeptics — whether government should have a role in the oversight of artificial intelligence, and that ‘every single person raised their hands, even though they had diverse views.'”
I guess “diverse views” is a new way of saying “the devil is in the details.”
Tech CEOs and leaders in attendance at what Schumer called the AI Insight Forum included OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Google’s Sundar Pichai, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and X/Twitter owner Elon Musk. Others in the room included Motion Picture Association CEO Charles Rivkin; former Google chief Eric Schmidt; Center for Humane Technology co-founder Tristan Harris; Deborah Raji, a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley; AFL-CIO President Elizabeth Shuler; Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers; Janet Murguía, president of Latino civil rights and advocacy group UnidosUS; and Maya Wiley, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, the Guardian said.