Senators ask tech billionaires: What’s up with AI?

A who’s who of tech leaders went to Washington this week for a closed-door Senate meeting with a simple goal: To help Congress understand what’s going on with AI right now.

Attended by the likes of Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg, as well as labor and civil rights groups, the session was the first in a series of “AI insight forums” organized by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. The idea is to beef up legislators’ knowledge of the tech’s ins and outs before they fashion any new rules to govern it.

While the forum wasn’t open to the media or public, releases of prepared remarks and reports coming out after the fact seem to indicate it was a civil affair with not much in the way of a clear path forward for regulation.

In a press conference after the forum, Schumer said the discussion started with the common ground that everybody in attendance believed some kind of government intervention to be necessary.

“I asked everyone in the room: Is government needed to play a role in regulating AI? And every single person raised their hands, even though they had diverse views,” Schumer said.

Too fast or too slow: Schumer’s opening remarks for the forum stressed the need for Congress to avoid “sticking our heads in the sand” and regulating AI before it “has taken hold in society.” But in the post-forum press conference, Schumer also said it can be dangerous to move too quickly on rulemaking, citing the European Union’s regulation efforts as an example.

“If you go too fast, you could ruin things. The EU went too fast, and now they have to pull back,” Schumer said. “On a timeline, it can’t be days or weeks, but nor should it be years. It’ll be in the general category of months.”

‘Referee’ needed: Tesla CEO Elon Musk told reporters outside the building that the dialogue was “a very civilized discussion, actually, among some of the smartest people in the world,” according to CBS News.

“It’s important for us to have a referee,” Musk told reporters. “I think the consequences of AI gone wrong are severe, so we have to be proactive rather than reactive.”

In a script of his prepared remarks released after the forum, Zuckerberg said he’d like to see Congress “engage with AI to support innovation and safeguards.”

“We think policymakers, academics, civil society, and industry should all work together to minimize the potential risks of this new technology, but also to maximize the potential benefits,” Zuckerberg said.

Knocks on the closed-door format: Schumer has said that the meeting was the first of nine planned sessions of its kind. But many critics, including Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, criticized the private nature of the gatherings.

“These tech billionaires want to lobby Congress behind closed doors with no questions asked. That’s just plain wrong,” Warren told NBC News.