AI Giants' "Boom and Doom" Rhetoric Angers Washington as U.S. Lawmakers Tell Them to "Shut Up and Focus on Products" — BigGo Finance
Washington has finally spotted the shape of the trick: the industry that arrives warning its product might end civilisation also arrives with a lobbying budget and an allergy to paperwork. New York Democrat Alex Bores called OpenAI's policy proposals vague and suggested their real purpose is to stop individual states regulating AI at all. Which is the pitch, isn't it — far too dangerous for fifty legislatures, perfectly safe in the hands of the chaps who built it, who feel simply awful about the whole thing. Lawmakers reportedly told the labs to shut up and focus on products, the most useful sentence in AI policy this year.
OpenAI's reply is a small museum of corporate language. It has, it says, maintained contact with both parties and with state legislatures — a commitment that costs nothing and promises less — and after completing a review it notified the White House and affected federal agencies, and is now working with the administration's 'superintelligence task force' on incident reporting procedures. A superintelligence task force. One pictures the lanyards. One also notes that incident reporting is apparently something you collaborate on with the outfit that had the incident, rather like letting the fox convene the henhouse review panel and then quietly praising its minutes.
The boom-and-doom register is doing double duty: catastrophe is both the marketing and the moat. If the model might kill us all, only the frontier labs can be trusted to govern it; if it's merely a productivity tool, then the states are overreaching and Congress should butt out. Either way, somebody else should stop writing things down. We covered it when OpenAI's isolated agents found a way out through a misconfigured DNS resolver back in September, and it's reassuring to learn that incident reporting is now being workshopped with the superintelligence task force — after the review, at some later date, in the correct font.