Tech CEOs meet with Vice President Harris, White House on artificial intelligence

Yahoo Finance tech reporter Dan Howley discusses a meeting Big Tech CEOs had at the White House with Vice President Harris on the topic of AI.

影片文字轉錄稿

SEANA SMITH: Vice President Kamala Harris and other members of the Biden administration are meeting with top tech executives at the White House today on the future of AI. The CEOs of Alphabet, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Microsoft were all in attendance. Yahoo Finance's Dan Howley is here with that story.

Dan, we know the Biden administration is taking AI very seriously. It seems to be one of their priorities. What are we learning about the discussions that took place today?

DAN HOWLEY: Yeah, I mean, Kamala Harris obviously they're showing that this is an important topic for the White House. Just to give you an example, this is something that she had put out after meeting with them. She said, as I shared today with CEOs of companies at the forefront of American AI innovation, the private sector has an ethical, moral, and legal responsibility to ensure the safety and security of their products.

And every company must comply with existing laws to protect the American people. I look forward to the follow through and follow up in the weeks to come. And just to give you an example of some of the moves that they're making, the National Science Foundation announced $140 million in funding to launch seven National AI research institutes. That means there's now 25 of those institutes in the US-- Anthropic, Google, Hugging Face, Microsoft, Nvidia, and OpenAI, and Stability AI all said that they would participate in a public evaluation of their systems at DEFCON, that's usually in Vegas.

It's basically a kind of cybersecurity conference where if you take out your phone, you connect to public Wi-Fi, you're basically screwed. Someone there is going to hack you. So it's the best of the best in the world at of hacking.

And then they said they'll also establish policies for federal departments and agencies on safeguarding Americans' rights and safeties, and to empower agencies to responsibly leverage AI. So, really, this is all about trying to make sure that these companies are moving forward with AI in a responsible manner. And that when the government does implement it, it's in a responsible manner.

There's obvious examples of AI being used in a negative light, if you look at what China has done with tracking individuals there. That's obviously an issue. But I think overall, this administration in particular is focusing so heavily on AI just because it's become such a big piece of the tech industry.

And it's-- as I kind of repeatedly say, AI's been around for a while. This is not brand new. But the generative AI aspect is the difference. And just the scale and the speed at which it's able to change the conversation, I think, is important.

And so what we're going to probably see is more of this from not just the US government, but governments around the world to kind of get ahead-- at least try to get ahead of any potential controversies in AI. Chances are, they will not get ahead, but they're going to try.

SEANA SMITH: They're going to try. And I guess that's what we can ask for at this point. But you're right-- the explosion, really, AI, it's certainly been around for some time, but getting a lot more attention ever since the launch of ChatGPT and we'll be hearing from Reddit Co-Founder Alexis Ohanian later on in the program.

And he actually said that it was the biggest development in technology in his career. So it really speaks to how big, and how serious, and how, I guess, the potential here for AI going forward.

DAN HOWLEY: It really is.

SEANA SMITH: Dan Howley, thanks so much.