philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

A California Bill to Regulate A.I. Causes Alarm in Silicon Valley

... Some notable A.I. researchers have supported the bill, including Geoff Hinton, the former Google researcher, and Yoshua Bengio, a professor at the University of Montreal. The two have spent the past 18 months warning of the dangers of the technology. Other A.I. pioneers have come out against the bill, including Meta’s chief A.I. scientist, Yann LeCun, and the former Google executives and Stanford professors Andrew Ng and Fei-Fei Li. ...

The bill would require safety tests for systems that have development costs exceeding $100 million and that are trained using a certain amount of raw computing power. It would also create a new state agency that defines and monitors those tests. Dan Hendrycks, a founder of the Center for A.I. Safety, said the bill would push the largest tech companies to identify and remove harmful behavior from their most expensive technologies.

“Complex systems will have unexpected behavior. You can count on it,” Dr. Hendrycks said in an interview with The New York Times. “The bill is a call to make sure that these systems don’t have hazards or, if the hazards do exist, that the systems have the appropriate safeguards.” ...

See the full story here: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/14/technology/ai-california-bill-silicon-valley.html