This week’s AI IRL video series talks about the balance between ‘charging ahead’ and quickly reining in ‘unintended consequences’
(Bloomberg) — The frenzy over artificial intelligence is conjuring up lessons investors and lawmakers have learned from technology’s past booms and busts.
In this week’s episode of the Bloomberg Originals video series AI IRL, we discuss how these two camps, who are sometimes at philosophical odds, will navigate helping to create and regulate AI as the technology’s promise and perils play out.
“On the one hand you have these opportunities to invest billions of dollars to build foundational models, which in some ways feel like railroad tracks,” said Bloomberg Beta partner James Cham. “The dream is that we’ll be able to build something that lasts for not just a few years but is durable for decades if not centuries. So there’s this sort of opportunity to try lots of different things and no one’s really sure what’s going to work yet.” That risk hasn’t stopped VCs from pumping more than $1.7 billion into generative AI startups in the first quarter of this year, according to PitchBook data.
The AI boom also puts pressure on lawmakers to proactively create guardrails after missteps with innovation waves of the past. The recent clampdown on crypto exchanges highlights the challenge regulators face in reining in technology that they don’t fully comprehend.
“At this point, I’m all for everybody charging ahead, being as creative and as innovative as possible, and then recognize that when bad things show up — unintended consequences — we need to be ready to react quickly and not wait 10 years as we did with social media,” said US Representative Don Beyer.
Beyer is the vice chair of the bipartisan Congressional AI Caucus and recently began pursuing a master’s degree in machine learning. He said that Congress should be mindful of not stifling innovation and that that one way to protect consumers is by regulating AI at the application level rather than in the code itself. The Virginia Democrat is optimistic about the positive impacts AI can have on society, but remains skeptical about fears of AI destroying humanity.
“I’m not persuaded on the singularity fears, although those seem to be the most existential out there,” he said. “And I guess we should be humble about it too because we don’t know and because things are moving so quickly, we need to be much more quickly reactive than we have been before.”
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