MAY 16, 2023
Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI.
The U.S. should require companies to be licensed by the government if they want to develop powerful artificial intelligence systems, the head of one the country’s top AI companies said at a Senate committee hearing Tuesday.
In his first appearance before Congress, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, the company that developed ChatGPT, said the U.S. “might consider a combination of licensing and testing requirements for development and release of AI models above a threshold of capabilities.”
Altman along with Christina Montgomery, chief privacy and trust officer of IBM, and Gary Marcus, a professor emeritus of psychology and neural science at New York University, were witnesses at a hearing held by the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary to discuss oversight of AI.
The rapid advancement of AI systems like ChatGPT has spurred many top technologists and academics to call for the industry to pause some development — and to ask for government intervention if that doesn’t happen.
But there’s little consensus on what broad regulations would look like, and Congress and federal agencies have struggled to figure out their role. On the eve of his testimony, Altman gave a presentation to about 60 lawmakers, wowing many of them.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., suggested that artificial intelligence models could be required to disclose what information they were trained on.
“Should we consider independent testing labs to provide score cards and nutrition labels or the equivalent of nutrition labels? Packaging that indicates to people whether or not the content can be trusted, what the ingredients are?” Blumenthal said.
Altman responded positively to the idea.
After Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., suggested people might use AI as a source for trusted information, Altman again said he thinks the government has a role to play in regulating the technology.
“I do think some regulation would be quite wise on this topic,” Altman said. “People need to know if they’re talking to an AI, if content they’re looking at might be generated or might not.”
This is a developing story.
Courtesy/Source: This article originally published on NBCNews.com
