Washington vs. A.I.
What Next | Daily News and Analysis
Slate Podcasts
4.3 • 2.4K Ratings
🗓️ 28 July 2023
⏱️ 27 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
At a White House summit late last week, some of the biggest names in tech - including Meta, Google and OpenAI - signed “voluntary” commitments to safeguard artificial intelligence. In Congress, Senate Leader Chuck Schumer recently introduced a “legislative framework” for A.I. law… but as they debate and deliberate, the A.I. train continues to move full steam ahead. It’s clear the government’s paying attention, but can they keep up with the technology?
Guest: Makena Kelly, politics reporter at The Verge
Don Beyer, U.S. representative for Virginia's 8th congressional district
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Three or four years ago, Congressman Don Byer started to get curious about artificial intelligence. |
| 0:11.0 | I ran across a Coursera course from Stanford on AI and I thought, this will be great, I'll do this. |
| 0:18.8 | And the first three weeks were wonderful and I was really impressed with just the math and even the |
| 0:25.5 | geometry of discovering new things from data. And then I took the first exam and got a zero. |
| 0:34.4 | He tried to teach himself linear algebra, but that wasn't working out either. So he gave up. |
| 0:40.4 | Byer is a Democrat who represents Virginia's eighth district. That's Arlington, Alexandria, |
| 0:46.8 | a lot of the DC Burbs. Then, about a year and a half ago, he went to visit George Mason University. |
| 0:53.9 | It's in his district to see its new innovation lab. |
| 0:58.0 | And I said, this is cool. Can I take a course here? And they looked at me funny and said, |
| 1:03.6 | well, we'll check. Anyway, they let me in at that point as a 71 year old. So now I'm in my fifth |
| 1:10.9 | course with another probably 11 courses before my artificial intelligence master's degree. |
| 1:18.9 | So yeah, he's a 73 year old congressman pursuing a master's in AI. |
| 1:26.3 | What do your colleagues in the house think of this? |
| 1:31.0 | Well, initially I would bring my math homework to the house floor, |
| 1:35.1 | which was an attractive nuisance. They would all come over and say, what are you doing? |
| 1:40.2 | And then they'd look at it and then they'd run away. |
| 1:42.8 | But the fun part is, when I started this a little more than a year and a half ago, |
| 1:50.1 | most of us had not heard of chat GPT, GPT4, large language models. And in the meantime, |
| 1:58.4 | all that has exploded. And so too has the debate about what does AI policy look like? |
| 2:05.2 | What should the guard rails be? And by virtue of my undergraduate courses, I get to be in the |
| 2:09.7 | middle of the debate. Right now, that debate is exploding in Washington. |
| 2:15.8 | Buyer says he's talked to members of Congress from both parties about legislation that focuses |
... |
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