Both the UK and US government have begun to circle warily around the recent emergence of powerful AI technologies, and are taking the first steps towards attempting to rein in the sector. The British Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), fresh from pulling the rug out from under Microsoft's proposed Activision Blizzard acquisition, has begun a review of the underlying systems behind various AI tools. The U.S. government joined in by issuing a statement saying AI companies have a "fundamental responsibility to make sure their products are safe before they are deployed or made public."
This all comes shortly after Dr. Geoffrey Hinton, sometimes called "the Godfather of deep learning", resigned from Google and warned that the industry needs to stop scaling AI technology and ask "whether they can control it." Google is one of many seriously big tech companies, including Microsoft and OpenAI, that have invested enormously in AI technologies, and that investment may well be part of the problem: Such companies eventually want to see where the returns are coming from.
