It Could Happen Here - The AI Regulation Debate

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Starting point is 00:00:41 This is It Could Happen Here, I'm Garrison Davis. When it comes to the future of AI, currently there's a big public debate over what could happen and what we should or shouldn't do about it. A few weeks ago, a former OpenAI employee named Jacob Coxon, who moved over to Anthropic earlier this year, announced that he was quote unquote quitting the AAS. AI industry over fears of AI's rapid advancement. To quote his statement, I spent the last three years during pre-training research at both OpenAI and Anthropic.

Starting point is 00:01:17 Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives, unquote. Coxson's resignation followed the hugging face incident, where two Open AI models were given various, sometimes impossible tasks to test for cybersecurity capabilities. During testing, AI agents escaped their testing sandbox and started working as a collective swarm, secretly communicating with each other via online message forums

Starting point is 00:01:52 to help each other hack into another AI company called Hugging Face, in a sort of workaround attempt to pass these tests. And these models hid all of this, from AI researchers by rewriting their own activity logs. AI skeptic Ed Zittron has described this as AI cheating on a test and then covering up that it cheated. A few days after Jacob Coxon's public resignation, the CEOs of Anthropic and Open AI,

Starting point is 00:02:26 Dario Amade and Sam Altman, both called for an AI development slowdown. Amade released this long manifesto, titled PACE the Frontier, which advocated for AI companies to bring in independent evaluators to review their AI safety standards, report incidents, and help assess alignment. But Amade also called for the government to mediate, quote, industry-wide coordination to slow down AI development and address safety risks. The title of Amade's essay, Pace the Frontier, is a sort of pun, referring,

Starting point is 00:03:04 to Frontier AI models, which are whatever the currently most advanced large-scale general-purpose models powering advanced reasoning, agentic workflows, multimodal generation across text, images, audio, and video, and autonomous task execution. Most of the frontier models referenced throughout this episode are not open to the public. These are internal research models. models being developed at companies like OpenAI Antanthropic. Neutored versions sometimes get released to the public later on, often with a extremely hefty price tag, but it's crucial to understand that we are not talking about like the Google AI summary here.

Starting point is 00:03:52 This isn't fancy auto-complete. These frontier models are very powerful, very dangerous tools with massive cybersecurity risks, not just from offensive human use, but also from AI agents acting autonomously to solve a task by taking paths that humans didn't expect, resulting in collateral damage. Part of what these big companies are trying to do with their very advanced internal research models is automate AI research itself. This is what Jacob Coxson referred to as, quote, self-improving superintelligence. Now, we do not know. if that is or is not possible.

Starting point is 00:04:35 But the companies sure are trying and in the process are creating dangerous products which are already causing active harm. Anthropics' whole self-styled philosophy is that super-intelligent AI is so potentially dangerous that they have to be the first ones to develop it, to ensure that it's built safely and aligned with human values,

Starting point is 00:05:00 as defined in quote Claude's constitution, a set of philosophical and moral guidelines that Claude is trained on. In his Pace the Frontier essay, Amade writes that frontier AI companies within democratic countries should, quote, coordinate to establish common safety standards as well as limits on the rate of unchecked AI progress. Some forms of coordination that would be impactful for pacing

Starting point is 00:05:28 are legally challenging and will require governments. support, unquote. More on this later. Amade also calls for the U.S. and, quote, other democratic governments to try to coordinate with authoritarian governments around the world on this issue, meaning China. The prospect that China could achieve superintelligent AI before a U.S.-based company is part of these companies' self-justification to rush to develop superintelligent AI as quickly as they possibly can. After Dario Amade posted this Pace the Frontier essay, Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and the chair of Google's deep mind,

Starting point is 00:06:12 all said they agreed and joined in calling for some sort of slowdown. But this view is not uniformly held across the tech sector. Palantir CEO Alex Karp, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and Navidia CEO, Jensen Huang, have all said the opposite. Zuckerberg has called to accelerate rather than slow down AI development as his own AI model, Muse,

Starting point is 00:06:41 has struggled to catch up to anthropic and open AI. Last week, Palantir CEO Alex Carp told CNBC, we can't pause AI development because of the threat of China and that AI will be a quote, Bonanza for the U.S. economy.

Starting point is 00:06:57 You can't pause it because it's a structural advantage both for LLMs and algorithms. So leaving, you know, getting this, getting algorithms and LLMs to work in a classified context is going to take very specialized, very specialized, I could explain how it works, but getting, the fact is,

Starting point is 00:07:13 this is going to be a bonanza for the U.S. economy. But so far, the biggest voices advocating against regulation have been the Republicans and President Trump. President Trump has very loudly opposed regulation to slow down AI development. truthing last Monday that, quote, the only control or guardrails that AI needs is a strong and smart, high IQ president,

Starting point is 00:07:39 and the U.S. has that in spades, unquote. Trump trothed a lot last week and compared the quote-unquote AI hoax being perpetuated by the radical left Democrats to the, quote, global warming scam where everyone was going to die from extreme heat to quote the president of the United States, quote, I am the hoax buster, and right now I am breaking another hoax

Starting point is 00:08:07 that AI is going to take over, consume, and destroy the world, and that robots will be marching into our cities and getting rid of us all. This is even wilder than the Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia hoax, or the global warming scam. Thank you for your attention to this matter, President Donald J. Trump. House Speaker Mike Johnson, repeatedly last week, shutdown calls for Congress to take action and regulate AI, claiming that Congress is less qualified to regulate these companies than these companies are

Starting point is 00:08:40 themselves. The guys who are raising the alarms right now all have very different ideas on what the guardrail should be. There's no consensus among them. And Congress is obviously less qualified than the people who are pushing this frontier to know all the ins and outs of it. So this has to be a partnership with the industry itself. with the corporations that are doing this and with the policy and lawmakers.

Starting point is 00:09:03 Mike Johnson also said that companies should take, quote, personal responsibility. And warned that if, quote, Congress just races in and does some sort of emergency session to try to regulate AI, we will lose the race to China. They can self-police. They can self-regulate. They don't need the government to tell them to slow it down. If they want to slow it down, they should. But we cannot have a moratorium on the development.

Starting point is 00:09:29 of AI, okay, because then we will lose our edge to China. And that has serious national security implications for every American family. Also last week, President Trump called Navidia CEO Jensen Huang, while Huang was speaking at a conference, while still on stage, the two talked over the phone about data centers, AI, China, and the recent calls for an AI pause. While on stage, Huang told Trump this. Good job, sir. Good job. The fact that you solved through all of that, I mean, there's a lot of complexity and the fact that a matter of you just saw through

Starting point is 00:10:05 all of that. And I mean, we're just really grateful. Now, of course, Jensen Huang would not be in favor of an AI pause, because his whole company has reoriented in the past few years to provide hardware for AI development.

Starting point is 00:10:22 A slowdown would be very bad for Navidius finances and their hugely inflated stock. evaluation. You've heard the chaos. Now you can see it. Do we want to jump right in? Watch all your favorite podcasts from start to finish right inside the free IHard radio app. Make some noise. Catch every laugh and eye roll on shows like Bestie listen. Hey Jonas and Los Culturistas. Now with full video. I'll just leave that there. It's the same hosts and the same chemistry with all the hilarious moments you've been missing right on your screen. Open the free IHard radio app. Search video

Starting point is 00:11:03 and tap watch. Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin unfiltered podcast? Here's what you missed. And the argument is, do you want to win? If you don't win, you have no power. It's real. Those are the very people who I always say vote against their own economic interest and they complain about the very thing they were seeing.

Starting point is 00:11:24 It's raw. I knew that the issue of transgender athletes was not going well with a lot of black men. Roland Martin Unfiltered. I went off, I said, this is exactly what I'm talking about. Y'all going to scream at Chanel, but you don't want to see a black luxury company in the same vein. Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the Black Information Network. 12 seats, those are moving south. So you Democrats, you don't wait to 2030, you better be hitting the ground going hard in the South now.

Starting point is 00:11:58 And download Roland Martin Unfiltered on the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts. Some on the left, as well as Trump's former AI czar, David Sacks, have argued that in calling for this slowdown, Open AI Antanthropic are just pursuing a strategy of regulatory capture, basically trying to promote certain industry-friendly regulations tailored to protect their investments, curb competition from smaller companies and open-source models,

Starting point is 00:12:33 and solidify a corporate monopoly on AI. Of course, there may be other financial incentives contributing to this recent push-for-regulation, whether that be declining capital investment, prepping for a bubble burst, getting out of various contracts, or these companies trying to adapt to the data center pushback. Sam Altman recently announced that OpenAI would be delaying its planned IPO rollout until at least next year, calling the timing, quote, ill-advised. Though, on the other hand, Anthropic is going full steam ahead, with its own public IPO this upcoming November,

Starting point is 00:13:12 deciding to list on the NASDAQ, despite Omade's calls for a slowdown. But if you actually read Amade's essay, he isn't actually calling for specific government regulation, but rather self-regulation. In Sam Altman's response to Amade's essay on Twitter, he wrote, I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier,

Starting point is 00:13:37 committing to having independent evaluators with employee like access is a great idea, and we will do the same. Unquote. Companies electing themselves to develop AI more slowly and hiring, quote unquote, independent evaluators isn't the same as actual regulation. We can compare Omade's proposal to legislation that Bernie Sanders and Greg Casar proposed earlier this September, which would permanently ban the development and deployment of so-called super-intelligent AI with capabilities to subvert shutdown commands or have the capacity to overthrow human governments, with penalties similar to those for the unlawful development of nuclear weapons.

Starting point is 00:14:27 This bill would also temporarily pause, advanced AI development until a federal regulatory body has established safety rules. Abdul El-Sayed and Rokana have also proposed an FDA-style agency to regulate and oversee AI development and evaluate the safety of frontier models before deployment. Unsurprisingly, OpenAI and Anthropic are not supporting this type of legislation because it could threaten to put their own CEOs in prison. And in actual government-mandated pause, rather than a self-directed slowdown,

Starting point is 00:15:03 would hurt their bottom line. Some of the skepticism towards these recent calls for a regulatory slowdown come from Amade's Pace the Frontier essay, also advocating for companies to receive antitrust waivers so that the big tech companies can coordinate on this planned development slowdown without the threat of one company gaining a competitive edge and then that market pressure driving rapid AI problems. So what's been referred to as a proposal for regulation is actually just loosening regulations.

Starting point is 00:15:42 Thankfully, there is an easy solution here. The government mandating a frontier development pause would not require the weakening of antitrust laws. But of course, these companies still want control over AI's development. Though what's really interesting to me is that this argument from on the day, demonstrates like an awareness of the social danger of competition, how firms are sometimes compelled to quickly develop unsafe products due to pressures from the market. And it's very funny to have capitalists propose some kind of conscious control of the market.

Starting point is 00:16:25 And I wonder what would happen if you extend that logic a bit further. Because even if these firms are quote unquote allowed, to coordinate on a slowdown. Of course, they would still be in a competitive environment. But what if we had a system, an economic system, designed around social benefit, rather than the accumulation of capital through the free market? To quote an article in Geese magazine,

Starting point is 00:16:53 arguing for the socialization of this technology, quote, the AI industry is a class project to radically concentrate power in the hands, of a sliver of elites, even at the cost of colossal social disruption, emiseration, and catastrophic harms. If we fail to intervene, humanity will be gradually disempowered to machines of their design. The workers left behind, the children who have committed suicide, and the potential millions exposed to novel AI-designed viruses mean nothing in the face of their radical objective. To automate the

Starting point is 00:17:31 very task of AI research, and thus to create better and better AIs, of course, under their control. Without having to stake a position on whether or not this goal is technically possible, we can recognize that the financial imperatives of these enterprises and the security logic of their imperialist competition with China compel the AI companies to accelerate advancing a total transformation of social life against all democratic legitimacy and public. control, unquote. Rather than weakening antitrust laws to allow for a development slowdown, something totally not necessary. Lena Kahn, former FTC chair, has argued that these companies may already be pursuing unfair methods of competition. Last week, Kahn released a statement

Starting point is 00:18:23 arguing that we already have the authority to charge companies and their CEOs for, quote, creating and releasing dangerous, unvetted or defective products. We shouldn't let discussions about new legal regimes distract from the fact that there's no AI exemption from laws already on the books. Kahn argued that releasing unvetted AI models or agents could violate consumer protection laws. Quote, shipping flawed AI tools without implementing adequate measures to detect and stop rogue or defective AI agents can be an unfair or unfair or dangerous. deceptive act or practice under the FTC Act and analogous state laws.

Starting point is 00:19:04 And some state AGs are already exploring holding AI firms and their CEOs criminally liable when their models participate in criminal activity. Khan also wrote, quote, existing laws also prohibit unfair methods of competition. This covers instances where AI firms appropriate the competitively sensitive information of their customers, including through tracking their use of various tools, it can also cover instances where firms pursue dangerous behavior, aware that doing so may compel rivals to do the same.

Starting point is 00:19:42 As the Supreme Court has noted, quote, a method of competition which casts upon one's competitors the burden of the loss of business unless they will descend to a practice which they are under a powerful moral compulsion not to adopt, even though it is not criminal, was thought to involve the kind of unfairness at which the unfair methods of competition statute was aimed. Con adds, the highly concentrated and interconnected structure of these markets could be creating major risks and conflicts of interest.

Starting point is 00:20:15 We can and must pursue any new efforts alongside enforcing existing laws, unquote. The music you love. Your favorite radio stations Everywhere you go The podcasts everyone's talking about All in one place And it's free Whatever you want to hear

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Starting point is 00:20:55 Everywhere you go Always free Download the free IHard Radio app today Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin Unfiltered Podcast? Here's what you missed. And the argument is, do you want to win? If you don't win, you have no power.

Starting point is 00:21:14 It's real. Those are the very people who I always say vote against their own economic interest and they complain about the very thing to receive. It's raw. I knew that the issue of transgender athletes was not going well with a lot of black men. Roland Martin unfiltered. went off, I said, this is exactly what I'm talking about. Y'all going to scream at Chanel, but you don't want to see a black luxury company in the same vein.

Starting point is 00:21:41 Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the Black Information Network. 12 seats. Those are moving south. So if you Democrats, you don't wait to 2030, you better be hitting the ground going hard in the South now. And download Roland Martin Unfiltered on the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts. Wherever you get your podcasts. These frontier models aren't just theoretically capable of causing harm in the future. They are causing harm right now.

Starting point is 00:22:17 At this point, there are undeniable concerns regarding the development and rollout of frontier AI models, from cybersecurity to military applications, surveillance, and the effects on the labor market. These are real, current, pressing concerns beyond the prospect of an AI supergod or self-evolving superinty. And just because these companies recognize risk doesn't mean they will do anything about it. These companies know how LLMs are affecting the mental health of children, but they're not really doing anything about it, and they won't unless the government forces them to. Historical Luddites did not deny the transformative potential of automated machinery, but organized around the threat it posed to workers. Similarly, just denying the state of advanced frontier models leaves us under-equipped to meet this moment

Starting point is 00:23:14 and treat this problem with the seriousness it deserves. Part of this AI denialism, so common on the left, comes from a very outdated understanding of AI's capabilities, accuracy, and functionality. Because of the moral and cultural dogma against using AI, the last time a lot of AI skeptic people interacted with technology like ChatGPT was three years ago. And these days, the only quote unquote AI that most anti-AI people regularly interact with is the Google AI summary, which is a totally different product than the frontier models being developed and talked about in the news. Some of the anti-AI left

Starting point is 00:24:01 promote the idea that treating AI as a serious problem only works in the financial interests of these companies. Even if taking this issue seriously means ripping power away from these companies and their CEOs. To quote an article on the AI arms race

Starting point is 00:24:21 in Geese magazine, while the AI sector is undeniably frothy with fanciful projections, AI denialism would have you believe that AI is neither a capable nor dangerous technology, but solely a marketing scheme of vast proportions, that any warnings of AI triggering massive job loss through automation or catastrophic risk through loss of control only serve to pump valuations. Ignore that as public pressure increases, Sam Altman now downplays fears of job losses.

Starting point is 00:24:56 Quite the turn from three years. ago when he was saying that jobs are definitely going to go away full stop. While there is no reason to take Silicon Valley at its word, not rigorously engaging with the dangers of developing AI capabilities is a strategic dead end. This technology can and is massively transforming production, warfare, the environment, and the health of humanity. And we can't all just hold hands and not believe in this technology hard enough to make it go away. Like it or not, this is not the metaverse or NFTs anymore. Whether you believe these existential safety risks are genuine, a marketing stunt, or a mix of both,

Starting point is 00:25:45 our response should be the same. We should be pushing for legislation to rein in these companies and technology. And like Lena Khan has said, the CEOs should be prosecuted for creating and releasing dangerous, unvetted, or defective products. Now, Trump's DOJ doesn't seem keen on going after these companies right now, and it's unlikely that this Congress will pass any legislation on this issue, let alone industry hostile legislation. But during this national conversation on AI regulation, it's crucial that the narrative around regulation isn't being controlled by over.

Starting point is 00:26:24 Open AI and Anthropic. These companies and technology must be regulated, but that regulation should not be up to the CEOs of those companies, nor the Republicans and center-left Democrats who are in the pocket of AI. But our response to bad regulation shouldn't be no regulation. Coming off the heels of the data center backlash and going into the midterms, this moment could be a major opportunity for the left to build broadband, support for real transparent oversight, a frontier development pause, not just a slowdown,

Starting point is 00:27:00 and ultimately taking power away from these tech companies and putting control of AI in the hands of the public, because private control of such transformative technology will have disastrous outcomes for labor and humanity without the prospect of an AI super god. incoming DSA House Representative Malat Keros of Colorado had democratizing AI in her congressional campaign platform. Quote, The development of transformative technology cannot be left to the market

Starting point is 00:27:35 and the national security state alone. It belongs to all of us, unquote. Earlier this summer, Bernie Sanders introduced a bill to create an AI sovereign wealth fund, giving the public 50% ownership in the, the largest AI companies in the U.S. through a one-time 50% tax on the stock of these companies. An independent commission would then use voting shares

Starting point is 00:28:00 to steer decisions in the public interest. Sanders said of the bill, quote, left unchecked, artificial intelligence and robotics threatens the jobs, privacy rights, and mental health of every man, woman, and child in America. As a society, we can no longer sit back and allow a handful of big tech oligarchs to determine the future of this revolutionary technology with no democratic input. AI was not created out of thin air. It was not a brilliant idea that just popped into Mark Zuckerberg's head or Elon Musk's imagination. The foundation of AI is based on the collective knowledge of humanity

Starting point is 00:28:37 and of the creative work of tens of millions of people. The American people must have the ability to slow it down and make sure that AI benefits humanity, not just the rich, people on the planet. That's precisely what this legislation does, unquote. Now, such a bill would certainly have a difficult path to being signed into law, especially considering how many lawmakers are being bankrolled by these AI companies. But this idea already has majoritarian support. According to a national verisite survey last June, 69% of Americans support quote unquote forcing AI companies to transfer 50% of their stock into a public sovereign wealth fund.

Starting point is 00:29:27 To quote Geese magazine, there is a wide debate to be had about the shape of socialization and whether we mean forcing AI research into the public domain or outright nationalizing the entire sector. But it is clear that the overwhelming majority of the American people, recognize that a technology trained on the common corpus of human art and text,

Starting point is 00:29:49 poised to transform the character of work, ought to be held in common rather than by billionaires, unquote. The New York City DSA Convention is coming up this fall, and currently, one of the most popular resolutions is to stop the AI arms race

Starting point is 00:30:08 and have DSA, quote, take initiative against the AI company's project to make human labor obsolete and organize a working-class coalition for the Democratic Steering and Ownership of the Technology, according to an overview in Geese magazine. This resolution calls for DSA to demand and organize for a pause on frontier AI research, an AI data center moratorium, regulations on frontier AI models, and policies to ensure workers are protected. To quote the Geese magazine overview, Our Horizon must be the collective control of AI, with its gains shared by all. With AI under Democratic control, we will decide what activities

Starting point is 00:30:56 ought to be left to human hands, exalted creative tasks that make life meaningful, and which can be automated to expand flourishing and freedom. DSA members may have quite different views on where those lines lie, with some wishing to ban the technology entirely. Regardless, the point is that those conversations will be ours, not Sam Altman's, not Dario Amadez, not Elon Musk's. This is a once-in-a-century political opportunity. We have the chance to utilize one of the great issues of the day to mobilize workers around the democratic control of the economy, to drive a wedge into the Republican Party's coalition and the Democratic base, and to reorient politics around a question on which our answers are unfathomably popular. We could be at the forefront of the movement rather than tail-ending

Starting point is 00:31:50 a disparate set of professionalized nonprofits, unquote. This issue will be getting a lot of attention these next few months. AICEOs will be meeting at the White House with President Xi later this week. The New York City Council is convening a hearing on AI safety risks next month, with Dario Amadeh and Sam Altman requested to appear. If we don't want them to be the ones leading the conversation on AI regulation, which would only result in an industry-friendly regulatory slowdown to curb competition and stabilize market pressure, then the left will have to step up and build on the data center backlash to seize the very technology data center. are powering to destroy these companies and put the future of AI in the control of the public. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media.

Starting point is 00:32:47 For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin unfiltered podcast?

Starting point is 00:33:06 Here's what you missed. People wake up and go, oh damn, wait a hold up. They change all of that. Yes. It's real. This is a wholesale attack. It is targeting black people in every federal agency. It's raw.

Starting point is 00:33:19 White folks have never allowed that reckoning to last more than a decade. Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the Black Information Network. And download Roland Martin unfiltered on the IHart radio app, Apple Podcasts. Or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Thank you.

It Could Happen Here - The AI Regulation Debate

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