It was another big week of A.I. news. The White House summoned the heads of four technology companies working on cutting-edge A.I. to a meeting with Vice President Kamala Harris to discuss potential regulation. President Joe Biden dropped by the meeting to issue an on-camera warning to the assembled executives that “what you’re doing has enormous potential and enormous danger.” He also said he was sure the executives were aware of this and that he hoped they could “educate us as to what you think is most needed to protect society.”
A summary of the meeting later provided by the White House said that the executives and Harris had “a frank and constructive discussion” on the need for the companies to be more transparent about their A.I. systems, the importance of there being a way to evaluate and verify the safety, security, and performance of this software, and the need to secure the systems from malicious actors and attacks. The White House also used the occasion to announce several new initiatives, including $140 million in funding to establish seven new National A.I. Research Institutes, a major red-teaming exercise where seven major A.I. companies will voluntarily submit their A.I. models to probing by independent security, safety, and ethics researchers at the DEFCON 31 cybersecurity conference in August, and a policymaking effort from the Office of Management and Budget that will result in guidelines for how the U.S. federal government will use A.I. software.
What got the most attention, however, is who was in the room—and who wasn’t. Meeting with Harris were the CEOs of Microsoft, Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic. (Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassibis also looked to be there from the video clip of Biden addressing the group.) When asked why only these companies, and not others, were present, the White House said it wanted to meet with the “four American companies at the forefront of A.I. innovation.” Many read that as a burn on Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, which has invested heavily in A.I. technology and research, but, unlike the companies meeting with Harris, has not integrated the technology into a consumer-facing do-it-all chatbot, as well as Amazon and Apple, both of which are perceived as lagging in A.I. development.
