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April 8, 2023 at 9:00 a.m. EDT

When Sen. Chris Murphy watched the video A.I. Dilemma, he saw a familiar face.

Tristan Harris, a tech ethicist well-known among lawmakers for ringing the alarm about the harmful effects of social networks, was now arguing that artificial intelligence represents a potentially catastrophic advance riskier perhaps to human survival than the advent of nuclear weapons.

The videos message which has been embraced by some tech luminaries like Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak resonated with Murphy (D-Conn.), who quickly fired off a tweet.

Something is coming. We arent ready, the senator warned.

AI hype and fear have arrived in Washington. After years of hand-wringing over the harms of social media, policymakers from both parties are turning their gaze to artificial intelligence, which has captured Silicon Valley. Lawmakers are anxiously eying the AI arms race, driven by the explosion of OpenAIs chatbot ChatGPT. The technologys uncanny ability to engage in humanlike conversations, write essays and even describe images has stunned its users, but prompted new concerns about childrens safety online and misinformation that could disrupt elections and amplify scams.

But policymakers arrive to the new debate bruised from battles over how to regulate the technology industry having passed no comprehensive tech laws despite years of congressional hearings, historic investigations and bipartisan-backed proposals. This time, some are hoping to move quickly to avoid similar errors.

We made a mistake by trusting the technology industry to self-police social media, Murphy said in an interview. I just cant believe that we are on the precipice of making the same mistake.

Consumer advocates and tech industry titans are converging on D.C., hoping to sway lawmakers in what will probably be the defining tech policy debate for months or even years to come. Only a handful of Washington lawmakers have AI expertise, creating an opening for industry boosters and critics alike to influence the discussions.

AI is going to remake society in profound ways, and we are not ready for that, said Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.), one of the few members of Congress with a computer science degree.

A Silicon Valley offensive

Companies behind ChatGPT and competing technologies have launched a preemptive charm offensive, highlighting their attempts to build artificial intelligence responsibly and ethically, according to several people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations. Since Microsofts investment in OpenAI which allows it to incorporate ChatGPT into its products the companys president, Brad Smith, has discussed artificial intelligence on trips to Washington. Executives from OpenAI, who have lobbied Washington for years, are meeting with lawmakers who are newly interested in artificial intelligence following the release of ChatGPT.

A bipartisan delegation of 10 lawmakers from the House committee tasked with challenging Chinas governing Communist Party traveled to Silicon Valley this week to meet with top tech executives and venture capitalists. Their discussions focused heavily on recent developments in artificial intelligence, according to a person close to the House panel and companies who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations.

Over lunch in an auditorium at Stanford University, the lawmakers gathered with Smith, Googles president of global affairs, Kent Walker, and executives from Palantir and Scale AI. Many expressed an openness to Washington regulating artificial intelligence, but an executive also warned that existing antitrust laws could hamstring the countrys ability to compete with China, where there are fewer limitations to obtaining mass scales of data, the people said.

Smith disagreed that AI should prompt a change in competition laws, Microsoft spokeswoman Kate Frischmann said.

They also called for the federal government especially the Pentagon to increase its investments in artificial intelligence, a potential boon for the companies.

But the companies face an increasingly skeptical Congress, as warnings about the threat of AI bombard Washington. During the meetings, lawmakers heard a robust debate about the potential risks of artificial intelligence, said Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), the chair of the House panel. But he said he left the meetings skeptical that the United States could take the extreme steps that some technologists have proposed, like pausing the deployment of AI.

We have to find a way to put those guardrails in place while at the same time allowing our tech sector to innovate and make sure were innovating, he said. I left feeling that a pause would only serve the CCPs interests, not Americas interests.

The meeting in the Stanford campus was just miles away from the 5,000-person meetups and AI house parties that have reinvigorated San Franciscos tech boom, inspiring venture capital investors to pour $3.6 billion into 269 AI deals from January through mid-March, according to the investment analytics firm PitchBook.

Across the country, officials in Washington were engaged in their own flurry of activity. President Biden on Tuesday held a meeting on the risks and opportunities of artificial intelligence, where he heard from a variety of experts on the Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, including Microsoft and Google executives.

Seated underneath a portrait of Abraham Lincoln, Biden told members of the council that the industry has a responsibility to make sure their products are safe before making them public.

When asked whether AI was dangerous, he said it was an unanswered question. Could be, he replied.

Two of the nations top regulators of Silicon Valley the Federal Trade Commission and Justice Department have signaled theyre keeping watch over the emerging field. The FTC recently issued a warning, telling companies they could face penalties if they falsely exaggerate the promise of artificial intelligence products and dont evaluate risks before release.

The Justice Departments top antitrust enforcer, Jonathan Kanter, said at South by Southwest last month that his office had launched an initiative called Project Gretzky to stay ahead of the curve on competition issues in artificial intelligence markets. The projects name is a reference to hockey star Wayne Gretzkys famous quote about skating to where the puck is going.

Despite these efforts to avoid repeating the same pitfalls in regulating social media, Washington is moving much slower than other countries especially in Europe.

Already, enforcers in countries with comprehensive privacy laws are considering how those regulations could be applied to ChatGPT. This week, Canadas privacy commissioner said it would open an investigation into the device. That announcement came on the heels of Italys decision last week to ban the chatbot over concerns that it violates rules intended to protect European Union citizens privacy. Germany is considering a similar move.

OpenAI responded to the new scrutiny this week in a blog post, where it explained the steps it was taking to address AI safety, including limiting personal information about individuals in the data sets it uses to train its models.

Meanwhile, Lieu is working on legislation to build a government commission to assess artificial intelligence risks and create a federal agency that would oversee the technology, similar to how the Food and Drug Administration reviews drugs coming to market.

Getting buy-in from a Republican-controlled House for a new federal agency will be a challenge. He warned that Congress alone is not equipped to move quickly enough to develop laws regulating artificial intelligence. Prior struggles to craft legislation tackling a narrow aspect of AI facial recognition showed Lieu that the House was not the appropriate venue to do this work, he added.

Harris, the tech ethicist, has also descended on Washington in recent weeks, meeting with members of the Biden administration and powerful lawmakers from both parties on Capitol Hill, including Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Mark R. Warner (D-Va.) and Sen. Michael F. Bennet (D-Colo.).

Along with Aza Raskin, with whom he founded the Center for Humane Technology, a nonprofit focused on the negative effects of social media, Harris convened a group of D.C. heavyweights last month to discuss the impending crisis over drinks and hors doeuvres at the National Press Club. They called for an immediate moratorium on companies AI deployments before an audience that included Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy, Republican pollster Frank Luntz, congressional staffers and a delegation of FTC staffers, including Sam Levine, the director of the agencys consumer protection bureau.

Harris and Raskin compared the current moment to the advent of nuclear weapons in 1944, and Harris called on policymakers to consider extreme steps to slow the rollout of AI, including an executive order.

By the time lawmakers began attempting to regulate social media, it was already deeply enmeshed with our economy, politics, media and culture, Harris told The Washington Post on Friday. AI is likely to become enmeshed much more quickly, and by confronting the issue now, before its too late, we can harness the power of this technology and update our institutions.

The message appears to have resonated with some wary lawmakers to the dismay of some AI experts and ethicists.

Sen. Michael F. Bennet (D-Colo.) cited Harriss tweets in a March letter to the executives of Open AI, Google, Snap, Microsoft and Facebook, calling on the companies to disclose safeguards protecting children and teens from AI-powered chatbots. The Twitter thread showed Snapchats AI chatbot telling a fictitious 13-year-old girl about how to lie to her parents about an upcoming trip with a 31-year-old man and gave advice on how to lose her virginity. (Snap announced on Tuesday that it had implemented a new system that takes a users age into account when engaging in conversation.)

Murphy seized onto an example from Harris and Raskins video, tweeting that ChatGPT taught itself to do advanced chemistry, implying it had developed humanlike capabilities.

Please do not spread misinformation, warned Timnit Gebru, the former co-lead of Googles group focused on ethical artificial intelligence, in response. Our job countering the hype is hard enough without politicians jumping in on the bandwagon.

In an email, Harris said that policymakers and technologists do not always speak the same language. His presentation does not say ChatGPT taught itself chemistry, but it cites a study that found that the chatbot has chemistry capabilities no human designer or programmer intentionally gave the system.

A slew of industry representatives and experts took issue with Murphys tweet; his office is fielding requests for briefings, he said in an interview. Murphy says he knows AI isnt sentient and teaching itself but that he was trying to talk about chatbots in an approachable way.

The criticism, he said, is consistent with a broader shaming campaign that the industry uses to try to bully policymakers into silence.

The technology class thinks theyre smarter than everyone else, so they want to create the rules for how this technology rolls out, but they also want to capture the economic benefit.

Nitasha Tiku contributed to this report.

Link:
A.I., ChatGPT critics and boosters descend on Washington - The Washington Post

What is a mind?

I must admit, I never expected there would be any reason to ask that question outside of a philosophy class.

But the hype and fear around artificial intelligence has grown to a fever pitch, making that question and others like it suddenly worth pondering.

What is a superintelligence? What is an identity? Do computers have egos?

This sudden contemplative turn is a result of a drumbeat of doom and hype about AI. Its going to change everything, we are told including possibly ending all life on Earth, apparently.

Consider: Half of AI researchers surveyed last summer believe there is a 10 per cent chance AI will lead to human extinction. OpenAIs Sam Altman, one of AIs most prominent proponents, says he worries it might end the world.

And as if that werent enough, last week an open letter signed by a long list of people that includes tech leaders Elon Musk, Andrew Yang and Steve Wozniak stated that its time to take a six-month pause on AI research to consider the risks.

Suddenly, weve gone from artificial intelligence being a sci-fi trope to being the source of some very public and very extreme fear.

Click to expand

As with any claim made by the capitalist class, some skepticism is warranted. How better to hype your new product than claim it is all-powerful?

But if a rare call by technologists to actually think about consequences is at least a little refreshing, the claims of both AIs doomsayers and its proponents border on the absurd.

The fear expressed in the letter reflects a broader trend in which ideas about the threat posed by artificial intelligence are optimistic at best and spurious at worst. AI is not about to lead to human extinction. And to understand why, one needs to answer some of those strangely abstract questions about minds, intelligence and identity that are nonetheless vital.

According to signatories of this letter, AI systems with human-competitive intelligence can pose profound risks to society and humanity. Those risks include things youd expect, like AI replacing jobs, to the more grandiose: non-human minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us, which represents a profound change in the history of life on Earth.

Here is the idea behind it: artificial intelligence very rapidly evolves to become sentient and is able to make decisions according to its own wishes. As it exponentially scales up in capability, it becomes an impossibly evolved mind, and in its superintelligent wisdom could, on a whim, simply wipe us all out.

This is wildly far-fetched. A mind is the product of will, of ego. When we act we, we do so not simply out of the programming of our ideology or our values, but also out of desire. While an intelligent software could act independently, it will never act intentionally because it has no identity from which to act.

There is also the more vexing question of what superintelligence actually might be. It bears asking what some combination of math and logic and synthesis might specifically produce that is so beyond the realm of imagining that it will revolutionize the world.

The assumption of a radical superintelligence misunderstands both what intelligence is and also what causes problems in the world. It isnt a lack of intelligence that has children starving, a housing crisis in countless cities, or climate change. It is, rather, politics it is how, when and where people and technology are deployed to address issues.

It betrays a blinkered view of life in which we simply arent smart enough to fix our problems. What is in fact true is that we are stuck in the issues of real life lived by real people, and as a result are mired in politics, history, culture.

Its the same myopic mentality from which some make claims about a coming human extinction. If we jump to the extreme example, a superintelligent AI might only launch the nukes if it has in fact been structured and allowed to do that. That is: whatever artificial intelligence becomes, it is up to humans to decide when and where it is used and to what ends it is put.

But then, even all this discussion is itself premature. Take another hugely complex software problem, the self-driving car. For years we were told they were just around the corner that is, until the people involved realized just how complicated the issue is and started saying that we are perhaps decades away from a fully autonomous car.

Are we to believe, then, that we cannot make a car that drives itself, but we can become gods and create a non-human mind?

It is not that artificial intelligence will not be transformative. The capacity to outsource the analysis and synthesis of data to technology will have both deep and broad effects.

But the doomsaying about AI is as much marketing as anything else just a lot of chatter about intelligence and minds from some very clever people who appear to have spent too little time thinking about what those things actually are.

Read more from the original source:
We still cant make a car that drives itself its unlikely our artificial intelligence creations will take over the world - Toronto Star

Artificial intelligence (AI)

Mainstream adoption of generative AI and conversational bots has left few spaces untouched, even religious communities

Write a sermon in the voice of a rabbi of about 1,000 words that relates the Torah portion Vayigash to intimacy and vulnerability. Cite Bren Browns scholarship on vulnerability. That was the prompt Rabbi Joshua Franklin put in ChatGPT, the results of which he used to deliver a sermon to congregants of the Jewish Center of the Hamptons in December 2022.

The sermon the chatbot came up with spoke of Joseph, the son of Jacob and a prophet in the Abrahamic faiths. It quoted from a book by Brown, a professor who specializes on topics of intimacy, to define vulnerability as the willingness to show up and be seen when we have no control over the outcome. Being vulnerable could mean we are able to form deeper, more meaningful bonds with those around us, the chatbot wrote.

It wasnt the greatest sermon, Franklin thought, but it was passable. And that was his point. The irony of the AI-written speech about vulnerability and human connection was that it lacked exactly what it preached: human vulnerability and emotion.

It actually had a little bit of content to it, he said. And the congregation thought it was written by some other famous rabbis. But if Im going to preach about vulnerability and intimacy, I would share something of myself as a model for vulnerability. And thats something that artificial intelligence and ChatGPT cannot do.

The mainstream adoption of generative AI and large language models in the form of chatbots like ChatGPT has left few spaces untouched, including religious communities.

In addition to the generalized chatbots, which can provide conversational answers to theological questions or prompts using information scraped from the entire internet, more specialized religious chatbots have emerged. One of them, HadithGPT, gives advice rooted in Islamic texts.

Together, the phenomenon is one religious leaders like Franklin have felt compelled to consider the potential utility as well as the potential ramifications of.

Its a major development, Franklin said. This would be like me commenting on how the internet is going to change the face of Judaism.

Other faith leaders who the Guardian spoke to may not be writing their sermons using chatbots just yet, but have similarly weighed the impacts of the rapid adoption of using AI chatbots to answer questions about religion. The resounding sentiment is that this is not exactly a novel circumstance.

Call it Rabbi Google as Franklin referred to it or Sheikh Google as Jihad Turk, the founding president of Bayan Islamic Graduate School, an institution for higher education on Islamic studies, referred to it, but people have long turned to the internet for answers about the intricacies and complexities of religion.

To some extent, this is just another iteration of how people might consider what opinion to follow, Turk said.

As someone who served as an imam of a community for a long time, I would often receive phone calls from community members that had a question related to Islams position on X, Y or Z after having done some of their own research which might include Googling it, talking to friends and other scholars, Turk said. So theres a lot of judgment calls that are being made by individuals anyway.

But ChatGPT and chatbots that use large language models, can have problems with accuracy because they prioritize responses that have a conversational flow rather than those that are precise, according to Beth Singler, the assistant professor in digital religions at the University of Zurich. That could pose a particular problem for religions like Judaism and Islam that have a strong dedication to textual sources.

That is a concern in itself that theres going to be a reforming of the theological knowledge thats been shared so accurately and so patiently for hundreds of years, because ChatGPT is sort of hallucinating answers, she said. Its a correlation machine. Its not a knowledge-finding machine. What it does is it predicts the likelihood of the following word.

HadithGPT, for instance, uses hadiths or the narrations of the sayings and life of the Prophet Muhammad to answer questions about Islam. Its responses come with a disclaimer: the answers are AI-generated and may not be accurate, it says. Islam is passed down from heart to heart and it is important to learn and consult real Islamic scholars for more accurate information.

Even with this disclaimer, an average person may not have access to an actual scholar they can consult, making it easier to rely exclusively on Sheikh Google or services like HadithGPT, Turk says. The source material is also missing a lot of context typically considered when answering Islamic questions, he added. That includes the human layer of analysis of the hadiths and consideration of other texts such as the Quran, as well as scholarly opinions and Islamic jurisprudence. Different schools of thought also give weight to different customs and traditions, he said.

The hadith are silent on a lot of questions that are more contemporary in nature, Turk said. Its much more complicated than just what do the hadiths say in a black and white fashion.

In other faiths like Buddhism, many practitioners are less text and more practice-centric, making the religion uniquely situated to shrug the proliferation of chatbots off, according to the Rev Angel Kyodo Williams, Roshi a Zen Buddhist priest in California.

Theres a practice centricity that takes all of the text and sets them aside and says, it doesnt matter how much you read, doesnt matter what you get out of a chatbot, Williams said. Thats not the answer. The answer is in your life: do you feel the truth of those words that you speak? And if you dont, thats really the only measure.

Concerns about an overreliance on increasingly sophisticated AI have sparked fears of job losses across industries, even among prominent AI and tech executives. But there is a bit of optimism among faith leaders like Williams. Though chatbots may free people up to do more functionally human things because theyre not spending time researching information from various sources, Williams believes theyll still long for human connection.

Nothing is going to replace the deep sense of this longing that we have to be connected and how thats felt in a true teacher, she said.

Franklin, who thinks he might use ChatGPT as a tool to help him write sermons, agrees. People are going to realize that human beings are no longer the best purveyors of information, he said. But what they can do that makes them distinctly human are those things that are precisely in the realm of religion and spirituality.

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Are chatbots changing the face of religion? Three faith leaders on grappling with AI - The Guardian

By Jon Swartz

Millennials who want to be part of the AI 'gold rush' are heading to San Francisco's 'Cerebral Valley' and other tech hubs around the country

In San Francisco's Hayes Valley neighborhood -- a hub for artificial intelligence that's been nicknamed "Cerebral Valley" -- more than 200 AI experts on artificial intelligence met in late March to discuss the white-hot technology and how to build businesses around it.

"The general sentiment was this is something that can be incredibly useful and dangerous. It is happening, and it is unstoppable," said Evan Buhler, co-founder and CEO of Generative Counsel, a San Francisco-based startup.

"I moved to the Bay Area in January from Florida to be part of something special," Buhler told MarketWatch. "It almost feels like destiny. AI could become the economic and spiritual center of San Francisco. Cerebral Valley has this community and edge on everywhere else because it is where the flow is."

Chooch, a startup that released a mobile AI app this week, says 15 people have joined the company over the last three months, most of them from outside California and some from outside the U.S. The AI surge has been a "beacon of light for the tech world" after months of shrinking market valuations, declining ad spending, layoffs, high interest rates, a turbulent economy and the immolation of Silicon Valley Bank, Chooch CEO Emrah Gultekin told MarketWatch. Chooch now employs 73 people.

And artificial intelligence isn't just fueling a return to San Francisco -- it's also drawing millennials to AI tech hubs around the country as they seek to be part of the next big thing. Venture-capital firms and large tech companies are pouring billions of dollars into AI technology. There were nearly 800,000 AI-related job openings in the U.S. last year, led by California's 142,000, according to data collected by Stanford University's Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence -- and the pace appears to be accelerating.

Meanwhile, although the San Francisco Bay Area lost 53,000 residents last year, that was less than one-third the number of people who left in 2021, according to data released by the U.S. Census Bureau last week.

On Thursday, Garry Tan, CEO of startup accelerator Y Combinator, said that more than 80% of the startups in his company's latest batch were based in San Francisco, and many of them are working on AI.

Despite a significant drop in venture funding and deals in the first quarter of 2023, AI is continuing to prove alluringto investors. Last month, a $150 million investment in startup Character.ai, led by venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (known as a16z), gave the startup a value of $1 billion.

The median pre-money valuation for generative-AI firms has catapulted to $90 million in 2023 from $42.5 million in 2022 , based on nine deals PitchBook tracked through March 29.

"The settlers are scrambling for their 40 acres [of digital land]," said Charley Moore, the CEO of Rocket Lawyer Inc. who is a longtime participant and observer in Silicon Valley. "Tech can have something of a herd mentality, and AI has captured some of the crypto zeitgeist." (Before AI, crypto was all the rage in tech, prompting a land rush of its own before it recently cooled down.)

California isn't the only destination for would-be AI entrepreneurs. Texas, New York and Florida are other big hubs, according to the Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence.

Appian Corp. (APPN), a cloud company in Tysons, Va., with AI apps, plans to hire 600 to 700 workers this year after adding 800 last year, bringing its total head count up to 2,300. And AI startup All Turtles, which decamped to Arkansas from San Francisco in late 2020, continues to hire steadily, CEO Phil Libin told MarketWatch.

Still, the surge in AI development has brought some millennials who left during the pandemic back to the Bay Area. At the SXSW tech conference in Austin, Texas, in March, "this came up a lot," Muddu Sudhakar, chief executive of AI startup Aisera, told MarketWatch. "People said they were returning to the Bay Area to be part of the AI revolution."

He added: "ChatGPT was the talk of every session, every discussion, and young people want to be in the middle of the action. It was like the gold rush."

Also read: Biden meets with advisers on 'risks and opportunities' in AI technologies

"AI is hot everywhere,"said John Chambers,the former CEO of Cisco Systems Inc. (CSCO) whose firm JC2 Ventures backs more than a dozen AI startups. "It is the third major frontier during my time in tech, and it will be bigger than the first two -- the Internet and cloud."

Debasish Biswas, the chief technology officer at AI data platform Aware, which is based in Columbus, Ohio,said engineering job applications are in the hundreds, up threefold from the previous quarter. Many of them are from job seekers based in the Seattle area and Silicon Valley and from the ranks of current and former employees of Big Tech companies such as Alphabet Inc.'s (GOOGL)(GOOGL) Google, Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN), Salesforce Inc. (CRM), and Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc. (META) -- all companies that have announced layoffs in recent months.

"People would rather work on solutions used by top brands rather than many layers away from activity," Biswas told MarketWatch.

Also read: U.S. economy added jobs again in March. Is this your last chance to jump ship?

Kira Makagon is the chief innovation officer at cloud software companyRingCentral Inc. (RNG) and leads the company's AI efforts. She said the recent rounds of layoffs and the current economic crisis have prompted tech talent to "make and do some fun things" at fledgling AI startups.

Indeed, the bloviation over AI -- nearly every major tech CEO has embraced the technology and hyped their own offerings the past few months, often during quarterly earnings calls with analysts -- has added to a three-ring-circus atmosphere that seems concentrated in the San Francisco Bay Area.

"We're just at the start of AI," Appian CEO Matt Calkins told MarketWatch. "There is the classic hype cycle versus trust debate at work here. AI is a tool, not a replacement. And there will be a roller coaster for at least six months."

Also read:The 'explosive' AI trend is here to stay. These stocks are poised to benefit

And: 'Should we risk loss of control of our civilization?' Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak and other tech leaders ask in petition to halt AI development

-Jon Swartz

This content was created by MarketWatch, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. MarketWatch is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

04-08-23 1426ET

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Can artificial intelligence reverse the tech downturn? Startups are ... - Morningstar