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US regulators have worked to get Congress up to speed on AI-related issues including intellectual property, human rights, and potential development guardrails. But recent hearings haven’t quite had the same entertainment value of Mark Zuckerberg explaining the internet back in 2018. The Hill isn’t exactly swarming with AI experts, and congressional leaders know it.
So Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is planning a series of forums this fall to help regulators beef up their AI knowledge, and this week Hill staffers headed to California to get a head start. Staffers held a “bipartisan boot camp” with Stanford University’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence last week, which featured three days of sessions focusing on everything from the basics of foundation models and deepfakes to China.
What exactly does AI summer camp involve? The 28 staffers who fled the DC heat for Stanford’s slightly cooler temps were treated to workshops and sessions by university faculty and graduate students whose diverse expertise included everything from healthcare and neuroscience to Chinese military and security.
Attendees, who included advisors for policymakers on both sides of the aisle (think Bernie Sanders, Cory Booker, Rick Scott, and Frank Lucas) sat in on sessions that started with basic AI concepts like compute power and neural networks and got as specific as the impact of AI on addiction. Plus, they were treated to high-profile speakers, including Meta’s chief ethicist, Chloé Bakalar, Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark, and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who closed out the camp with a discussion of AI’s impact on governance.
And the boot camp wasn’t limited to speaker panels—staffers also took part in a National Security Council “simulation” focusing on AI deployment for national security in response to an imagined crisis in the Taiwan Strait.
Of course, no summer camp would be complete without a certificate of completion. We here at Tech Brew are guessing the Stanford University AI certificates will stay on the wall longer than the archery awards from the summer of 2009.—MA