YouSaid · the spoken record

Alondra Nelson

lines on the record: 77
first: 2024-07-15
most recent: 2024-07-15
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And how people form opinions in ways that we've never had before. And so if you combine the classic insights of social science research with data and AI, I think it's going to be, it's starting to be very, very powerful, which, as you know from everything I've told you means it's going to come with bright and dark sides. And so I think that's one of the interesting and important frontiers.”
2024-07-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Biden’s top tech advisor on why AI safety is a “today problem” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think about that all the time. That's one of my favorite questions. 20 and 30 years ago, the answer to that was biology starting to emerge. Now I think that's a full-blown set of capabilities, not just cool science, but powerful capabilities, of course, for pharmaceuticals, but also for bioprocessing, biomanufacturing to make sustainable pathways for things that we currently get through petrochemicals. I think that's a very fertile area. It's an area that we put a lot of focus on. Now, if you ask me what's happening in research that could have huge implications, I would tell you it's about what's changing in the social sciences. We tend to talk about the progression of the information revolution in terms of computing and communications and the technology. But as that technology has gotten so intimate with us, it is giving us ways to understand individual and societal behaviors and incentives.”
2024-07-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Biden’s top tech advisor on why AI safety is a “today problem” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We've talked a lot about things that are happening now that started a long time ago, right? The RD investment in AI started a long time ago, the explosion is now. The investment in chips started a long time ago. That's your career. The explosion and the focus is now. As you think about your office and the policy recommendations you're making, what are the small things that are happening now that might be big in the future?”
2024-07-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Biden’s top tech advisor on why AI safety is a “today problem” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's one of the hardest challenges, and I think we're very fortunate that the company is a European company and has operations around the world and is a good, you know, that company in the country is a good partner in the ecosystem. And I think that is a very hard challenge, as you well know, because the cost and the complexity of those systems has just, it's actually mind-boggling when you see what it takes to make, you know, this thing that ends up being square centimeter, the complexity of what goes behind that is astonishing.”
2024-07-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Biden’s top tech advisor on why AI safety is a “today problem” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Number one part of the Chips Act is a substantial investment over $10 billion in R&D. And number two, I spent a lot of my career on semiconductor R&D. That's not where we fell down. It's about turning that R&D into U.S. manufacturing capability. And once you lose the leading edge, the next generation, the next generation is going to get driven wherever your leading edge is. So R&D eventually moves. I think it was a well-constructed package and chips that said, number one, we got to get manufacturing capacity at the leading edge back, and then we build the R&D to make sure that we also win in the future and be able to move out beyond that.”
2024-07-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Biden’s top tech advisor on why AI safety is a “today problem” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To have a perfect world, but we can get to a far better future. So the investments that have been made include Intel, which is fighting to get back in and drive to the leading edge. It's also, as you noted, TSMC and Samsung and Micron, all at the leading edge. Three of those are logic, one of Micron is memory. And, you know, Secretary Raimundo has just really driven this hard, and we're on track to have leading edge manufacturing. Not all leading edge manufacturing. We don't need it all in the United States, but a substantial portion here in America will still be part of global supply chains, but we're going to reduce that really critical vulnerability.”
2024-07-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Biden’s top tech advisor on why AI safety is a “today problem” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Technologies that I got to help start that are in those chips. So a lot of good RD got done, but over those 40 years, great things happened, but all the manufacturing at the leading edge eventually moved out of the United States, putting us in this really bad situation for our supply chains, for jobs that all those supply chains support. The president likes to talk about the fact that when a pandemic shut down a semiconductor fab in Asia, there were auto workers in Detroit who were getting laid off. So this is, you know, these are the implications. And then from a national security perspective, the issues are huge and I think very, very obvious. So what was shocking is that after four decades of admiring this problem, we finally did something about it. And with the president and the congress pulling together a really big investment is happening. So how do we get from here to the point where our vulnerability has been significantly reduced? Again, you don't.”
2024-07-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Biden’s top tech advisor on why AI safety is a “today problem” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's a comprehensive strategy built around the 52 billion dollars that was funded by Congress with President Biden pushing hard to make sure we get semiconductors back at the leading edge in the United States. But I want to step back from that and tell you that this fall is 40 years since I finished my PhD, which was on semiconductor materials. And I came to Washington. My hair was still blackly on. And I came to Washington on a congressional fellowship. And what I did was write a study on semiconductor R&D for Congress. And back then, the U.S. semiconductor industry was extremely dominant. And at that time, they were worried that these Japanese companies were starting to gain market share. And a few actions happened. A lot of really good R&D happened. I got to build the first semiconductor office at DARPA. And, you know, like every time I look at my cell phone, I think about the three or five.”
2024-07-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Biden’s top tech advisor on why AI safety is a “today problem” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let's spend a few minutes talking about chips because that is the other piece of the puzzle, the entire tech industry right now is thinking about chips, particularly NVIDIA's chips, where they're made, where they might be under threat quite literally because they are made in Taiwan. There's obviously the geopolitics of China involved there. There's a lot of investment from the Chips Act to move chip manufacturing back in the United States. A lot of that depends again on the idea that we might have some national champions once again. I think Intel would love to be the beneficiary of all of that ships funding. They can't operate at the same process nodes as TSMC right now. How do you think about that R&D? Is that longer range? Is that, well, let's just get some TSMC fabs in Arizona, other places and catch up? What's the plan?”
2024-07-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Biden’s top tech advisor on why AI safety is a “today problem” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Human beings. And so that's, I think that's, we have to understand the scale of the challenge and the work that the AI safety institute here is doing. This is a NIST organization that was started in the executive order. They're doing exactly the right first steps, which is working with industry, getting everyone to understand what current best practices are for red teaming. That's exactly where to start. But I think we also just have to be clear that our current best practices for red teaming are not very good compared to the scale of the challenge. So this is actually an area that's going to require deep research. And that's ongoing in the companies and more and more with federal backing in universities. And I think it's essential.”
2024-07-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Biden’s top tech advisor on why AI safety is a “today problem” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it's actually hard to achieve, but it's also hard to assess and measure. And all the benchmarks that exist for AI models, you know, it's interesting to hear how they do on standardized tests, but they're just, they just are benchmarks that tell you something. They don't really tell you that much about what happens when humanity interacts with these AI models, right? And one of the limitations in the way we're talking about this is we talk about the technology, all the interesting things happen when human beings interact with the technology. And if you think models, AI models are complex and opaque, you should try.”
2024-07-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Biden’s top tech advisor on why AI safety is a “today problem” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let's talk about two things. Number one, I think just understanding which companies are pursuing this particular dimension of advancement and capability, more compute, that's helpful to understand just to be aware of the potential for big advances, which might carry new risks with them. So that's the role that it plays. I want to turn to safety because I think this is a really important subject. Everything that we want from AI hinges on the idea that we can count on it, that it's effective at what it's supposed to do, that it's safe, that it's trustworthy. And that's very easy to want. It turns out, as you know, to be very hard to.”
2024-07-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Biden’s top tech advisor on why AI safety is a “today problem” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As I recall, that's above a particular threshold of compute. So much of the executive order was dealing with the applications, the use of AI. This is the part that was about AI models, the technology itself. And there was a lot of thought about what was appropriate and what made sense and what worked under existing law. And the upshot was a requirement to report once a company is training above a particular compute threshold. I'm not aware that we've yet hit that threshold. I think we're sort of just coming into that moment, but that's a Department of Commerce executes that and they've been putting all the guidelines in place to implement that policy. But we're still at the beginning of that, as I understand it.”
2024-07-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Biden’s top tech advisor on why AI safety is a “today problem” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I want to ask, I just want to more questions about AI, and I want to end on chips, which I think is an equally important aspect of this whole puzzle. President Biden's AI executive order came out. It prescribed a number of things. The one that stood out to me is potentially most interesting in my role as a journalist is the requirement that AI companies would have to share their safety test results and methodologies with the government. Is that happening? Have you seen results there? Have you seen change? Have you been able to learn anything new?”
2024-07-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Biden’s top tech advisor on why AI safety is a “today problem” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“True, but there wasn't really much constraining the spread of bad information. And I've been thinking a lot about the fact that there's a different AI. It's the AI that was behind the algorithmic drive of what ads come to you and what's next in your feed, which is based on learning more and more and more about you and understanding what will drive engagement. That's not generative AI. It's not LLMs, but it's a very powerful force that has been a big factor in the information environment that we were in before chatbots hit the scene.”
2024-07-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Biden’s top tech advisor on why AI safety is a “today problem” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think you should go ask Senator Amy Klobuchar On exactly that issue because there are people who thought very deeply and sincerely about exactly this issue. We've always had limits on First Amendment rights because of the harms that can come from the abuse of the First Amendment. And so I think that will be part of the situation here. And, you know, social media, I think there's a lot of regret about where things ended up. But again, you know, Congress really does need to act and there are things that can be done to protect privacy, which that's important directly protecting privacy, but it is also a path to changing the pace at which bad information travels through our social media environment. There's been so much focus on generative AI and its potential to create incorrect or misleading information.”
2024-07-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Biden’s top tech advisor on why AI safety is a “today problem” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Reason I ask that is the social media comparison comes up all the time. I spoke to President Obama when President Biden's executive order on AI came out, and he made essentially the direct comparison. We cannot screw this up the way we did with social media. And I put it to him and I'll put it to you. Well, you got the First Amendment is sort of in your way. Like if you tell a computer there are things you don't want it to make. You have kind of passed the speech regulation one way or the other. You've said don't do deepfakes, but I want a deep fake President Biden or President Trump during the election season. That's a hard rule to write, right? It's difficult in very real ways to implement that rule in a way that comports to the First Amendment. But we all know we should stop deepfakes. How do you thread that needle?”
2024-07-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Biden’s top tech advisor on why AI safety is a “today problem” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, freedom of speech is one of the most fundamental American values. It's the foundation of so much that matters for our country, for our democracy, for how it works. And it's such a serious factor in everything. And before we get to the current generation of AI, of course, that was a huge factor in how the social media story unfolded. We're talking about a lot of things where I think civil society has an important role to play, but I think these topics in particular are ones where I think civil society really rests on their shoulders because there are a set of things that are appropriate for the government to do and then it really is up to the citizens.”
2024-07-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Biden’s top tech advisor on why AI safety is a “today problem” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Does feel like a lot of tech policy conversations land on speech issues one way or another or copyright issues in one way or another? Is that something that's on your mind that? As you make policy about investment over time or research and development over time in these areas, there's this whole other set of problems that the federal government in particular is just not suited to solve around speech and copyright law.”
2024-07-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Biden’s top tech advisor on why AI safety is a “today problem” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, this seems like the hard problem, like Apple announced Apple Intelligence a few weeks ago. And then sort of in the middle of the presentation, like, and we trained on the public web. But now you can block it That seems like well, you took it. What do you want us to do now? Like, if you can build the models by getting a bunch of pharma companies to pool their data and extract value together from training on that, that makes sense, right? There's an exchange there that feels healthy, or at least negotiated for. On the other hand, you have OpenAI, who is the darling of the moment, kind of getting in trouble over and over again for being like, yeah, we just took a bunch of stuff. Sorry, Scarlet Johansson. Like, is that part of the policy remit for you, or is that we're definitely going to let the court sort that out?”
2024-07-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Biden’s top tech advisor on why AI safety is a “today problem” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Starting to envision a path towards a future where you can build an AI model that trains across those data sets. But I don't think we're going to get there unless we find a way for all parties to come to an agreement about how they would be compensated for having their data trained on, right? It's the same core issue that we're dealing with with LLMs and image generators. So I think there's a lot that the courts are going to have to sort out and that I think businesses are going to have to sort out in terms of what they consider to be fair value.”
2024-07-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Biden’s top tech advisor on why AI safety is a “today problem” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know the answer to that. You know, I talked about the places where AI accelerates harms or risks That we're worried about, but they're already illegal. You put your finger on what is my best example of new ground because this is a different use of intellectual property than we've had in the past. And I mean, right now what's happening is the courts are starting to sort it out as people bring lawsuits. And I think there's a lot of sorting out to be done. I'm very interested in how that turns out from the perspective of LLMs and image generators. But I think it has huge implications for all the other things I care about using AI for. I'll give you an example. If you want to build design tools that actually are great at generating good drug candidates, the most interesting data that you want in addition to everything you currently have is clinical data. What happens inside of human beings? Well, that data is proprietary. There's a lot of it, but it's all locked up in one pharmaceutical company after another. Each one is really sure that they've got the crown jewels.”
2024-07-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Biden’s top tech advisor on why AI safety is a “today problem” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I talked to a very different, a broader group of people who are seeing AI, I think, in different ways. What I'm hearing from you is I think it is a very good reflection of what I'm hearing in the business community. But if you talk to the broader research and technical community, I think you do get a bigger view on it. Because the implications are just so different in different areas when you, especially when you move to different data types. I don't know if it's going to live up to it. That's an unknown question. And I think the answer is going to be both a technical answer and a practical one that businesses are sorting out. Like what are the applications in which the quality of the responses is robust and accurate enough for the work that needs to get done? So I don't, you know, I think that's all got to still play out.”
2024-07-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Biden’s top tech advisor on why AI safety is a “today problem” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let me ask the simplest version of that question right now, what most Americans perceive is AI is not the cool photo processing that has been happening on an iPhone for years. They perceive the chatbots. Like this is the technology that's going to do the thing. Retrieval, augmented generation inside your workplace is going to displace an entire floor of analysts who might otherwise have asked the questions for you. This is the pitch that I hear. Do you think that that specifically LLM technology can live up to the burden of the expectations that the industry is putting on it? Because I feel like that, whether or not you think that is true kind of implicates how you might want to regulate it. And that's what most people are experiencing now. And most people are worried about now.”
2024-07-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Biden’s top tech advisor on why AI safety is a “today problem” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Those each bring different kinds of advances and capability and with it risks. And then the third dimension I want to offer is the fact that AI models, you never interact with an AI model. AI models live inside of a system, even a chatbot's actually an AI model embedded in a system. But as AI models become embedded in more and more systems, including systems that take action in the online world or in the physical world, like a self-driving car or a missile, that's a very different dimension of risk is what actions ensue from the output of a model. Unless we really understand and think about all three of those dimensions together, I think we're going to have an oversimplified conversation about capability and risk.”
2024-07-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Biden’s top tech advisor on why AI safety is a “today problem” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Machine learning, and that's exactly where I want to go next because I think we are having a somewhat oversimplified conversation about where do advances in capability come from and capability is always comes hand in hand with risk. So I think about this a lot, both because of the things I want to do for the bright side, but also because it's going to come with dark side. So the one dimension that we talk about a lot for all kinds of reasons is primarily about LLMs, but it's about very large foundation models and it's a dimension of increasing capability that's defined by more data and more flops of computing, right? That's what has dominated the conversation. I want to introduce two other dimensions. One is training on very different kinds of data. We've talked about biological data, but there are many, many, many other kinds of data, all kinds of scientific data, sensor data, administrative data about people.”
2024-07-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Biden’s top tech advisor on why AI safety is a “today problem” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, I have a lot to say about this. So, number one, this is how we do things, right? As we get very excited about some new capability and we just go crazy about it and people get so jazzed about what could be possible. It's the classic hype curve, right? It's the classic thing. And so of course that's going to happen. Of course we're doing that in AI. You know, when you peel the onion for really genuinely powerful technologies, when you're through the hype curve, really big shifts have happened. And I'm quite confident that that's what's happening with AI broadly in this machine learning generation.”
2024-07-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Biden’s top tech advisor on why AI safety is a “today problem” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of the things about that road that is fascinating to me is there seems to be a core assumption baked into everyone's mental models that the capability of AI as we know it today will continue to increase almost at a linear rate. Like no one is predicting a plateau anytime soon. You mentioned last year it was pretty crazy for you. That's leveled off I would attribute at least part of that to the capabilities of the AI systems have leveled off is you've had time to look at this and you think about the amount of technology you've been involved with over your career do you think we're overestimating the rate of progression here? Do you think these, particularly the LLM systems can live up to our expectations?”
2024-07-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Biden’s top tech advisor on why AI safety is a “today problem” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know. I don't know because it's a live topic and it will, you know, we've talked about some of the factors. One is can you actually do it? Are you just trying to hold water in your hand and it's slipping out? And then secondly, if you do it effectively, no action comes without a cost. So what is the cost? Does it slow down your ability to design the breakthrough drugs that you need? Cybersecurity is the classic example, right? Because the exact same advanced capabilities that allow you to find vulnerabilities quickly if you are a bad guy, that's bad for the world. If you're finding those vulnerabilities and patching them quickly, then it's good for the world. But it's the same core capability. So again, I think it's not yet clear to me how this will play out, but I think it's a tough road that everyone's trying to sort out right now.”
2024-07-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Biden’s top tech advisor on why AI safety is a “today problem” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Talk about the shift between public and private funding over time and it moves back and forth. Computing is largely the same. There are open eras of computing and closed eras of computing. There are more controlled eras of computing. It feels like with AI we are headed towards a more controlled era of computing where we do want powerful biodesign tools, but we might only want some people to have them, as opposed to, I would say, up until now, software's in pretty widely available, right? New software, new capabilities hit they get pretty broadly distributed right away. Do you feel that same shift that, okay, we might end up in a more controlled era of computing?”
2024-07-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Biden’s top tech advisor on why AI safety is a “today problem” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But it's not like controlling nuclear materials. It's a very different kind of situation. So yeah, I mean, I think that's why that's hard. My personal view is that people would love to find a simple solution where you corral the core technology. I actually think that in addition to being hard to do for all the reasons you mentioned, one of the persistent issues is that there's a bright and dark side to almost every application. So there, you know, there's a bright side to these image generators, which is phenomenal creativity. If you want to build biodesign tools, of course a bad actor can use them to build biological weapons. That's going to get easier, unfortunately, unless we do the work to lock that down. But that's actually going to have to happen if we're going to solve vexing problems in cancer. So this is what makes it so complex is recognizing that there's a bright and a dark side. And then finding”
2024-07-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Biden’s top tech advisor on why AI safety is a “today problem” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let's start with that. So, if you look at the applications, a lot of the things that we're worried about with AI are already illegal and, you know, committing fraud is illegal and this kind of online degradation. So where things are illegal, the issue is one of enforcement because it's actually harder to keep up with the scale of acceleration with AI, but there are things that we can do about that and our enforcement agencies are serious. And there are many examples of actions that they're taking. What you're talking about is a different class of questions, and it's one that we have been grappling with, which is what are the ways to slow and control potentially the technology itself. And I think for the reasons you mentioned and many more, that's a very different kind of challenge because at the end of the day, this is, models are a collection of weights. It's a bunch of software and it may be computationally intensive.”
2024-07-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Biden’s top tech advisor on why AI safety is a “today problem” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I want to pull you up out of the place that you went for a minute because what you Talking about is regulating AI models at the software level or at the hardware level. But what I've been talking about is regulating the use of AI in systems, the use by people who are doing things that create harm.”
2024-07-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Biden’s top tech advisor on why AI safety is a “today problem” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's a part of me that says in the history of computing there are very few things the government says I cannot do with my MacBook. Right, I buy a MacBook or I buy a Windows laptop and I put Linux on it. Now I'm just pretty much free to run whatever code I want. And there's a very, very tiny list of things. I'm not allowed to counterfeit money with my computer. And it's some layers of the application stack that is prevented. Printer drivers won't let you print a dollar bill. Once you expand that to there's a bunch of stuff we won't let AI do. And there are open source AI models that you can just go get. The question of where do you actually stop it to me feels like it requires both a cultural change in that we're going to regulate what I can do with my MacBook in a way that we've never done before. And B, we might have to regulate it at the hardware level because if I can just download some open source AI model and tell it to make me a bum.”
2024-07-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Biden’s top tech advisor on why AI safety is a “today problem” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“and can reduce the spread and the volume. So just as an example, payment processors can have terms of service that say we won't provide payment processing for these kinds of uses. Some actually have that in their terms of service. They just need to enforce it. I've been happy to see a response from the industry because I think that's an important first step and we'll continue to work on the things that might be longer term solutions. But I think everyone looks for a silver bullet and almost every one of these real world issues is something that there is no one magic solution, but there are so many things you can do if you understand all the different aspects of it. Think of it as a systems problem and then just start shrinking the problem until you can choke it, right?”
2024-07-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Biden’s top tech advisor on why AI safety is a “today problem” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Want to reframe your question into a system because There's not one place that this problem gets fixed, and it's all the things that you are talking about. Some of the measures, for example, protecting kids and protecting privacy require legislation, but they would have a broad inhibition of the kind of accelerated spread of these materials. A very different act that we did recently working with the Gender Policy Council here at the White House, we put out a call to action to companies because we know the legislation is not going to happen overnight. This has been, you know, we've been hoping and wishing that Congress could move on it, but this is a problem that's right now. And the people who can take action right now are companies. And so we put out a call to action that called on payment processors and called on the platform companies and called on the device companies because they each have specific things that they can do that doesn't magically solve the problem but inhibits this and makes it harder.”
2024-07-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Biden’s top tech advisor on why AI safety is a “today problem” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'll tell you how we're approaching that specific issue. Number one, the president has called on Congress for legislation on privacy and on protecting our kids, most particularly as well as broader legislation on AI risks and harms. And so some of the answer to this question requires legislation that we need for this problem, but also for...”
2024-07-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Biden’s top tech advisor on why AI safety is a “today problem” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hear that makes sense to me. What I hear often in opposition to that is well, you could do that in Photoshop before. So, like, the rules should be the same. And then it's to me, at least, the difference is, well, you couldn't just open Photoshop and tell it what you wanted and get it back. You had to know what you were doing. And there was a rate limiter there or a skill limiter there that prevented this thing, these bad things from happening at scale. The problem is I don't know where you land. You tell Adobe not to do it? Do you tell NVIDIA not to do it? Do you tell Apple not to do it at the operating system level? Like where do you think is a policymaker those restrictions should live?”
2024-07-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Biden’s top tech advisor on why AI safety is a “today problem” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So for our work, I think it's really important to be clear about the specific applications, the risks, the potential, and then take actions now on things that are problems now and then lay the ground so that we can avoid problems to the greatest degree possible going forward.”
2024-07-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Biden’s top tech advisor on why AI safety is a “today problem” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Conversation to say that in some future there will be these devastating harms that are possible or that will happen. The fact of the matter is that there are devastating harms that are happening today. And I think we shouldn't pretend that it's only a future issue. The one I will cite that's happening right now is online degradation, especially of women and girls. The idea of using non-consensual intimate imagery to really just ruin people's lives was around before AI, but when you have image generators that allow you to make deep fake news at a tremendous rate, it looks like this is actually the first manifestation of real, an acceleration in harms as opposed to just risks with generative AI. The machines don't have to make huge advances in capability for that to happen. That's a today problem and we need to get after it right now. We're not philosophers. We're trying to make policies that get this right for the country.”
2024-07-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Biden’s top tech advisor on why AI safety is a “today problem” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I've got a position on that. First of all, I am struck by the irony of it's the end of the world and therefore we have to drive. Hear that as well. Look, here's the thing I think there's a very garbled conversation about the implications, including safety implications of AI technology. I'll tell you how I see it, and you can tell me if it matches up to what you're hearing. Number one, again, I start with the breadth of AI. And part of the cacophony in the AI conversation is that everyone is talking about the piece of it that they really care about, whether it's bias and algorithm. If that's what you care about, that's killing people in your community, then yes, that's what you're going to be talking about. But that's actually a very different issue than misinformation being propagated more effectively. All of those are different issues than what kinds of new weapons can be designed. I find it really important to be clear about what the specific applications are and the ways that the wheels can come off. I think there's a tendency in the AI.”
2024-07-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Biden’s top tech advisor on why AI safety is a “today problem” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“From weather forecasting to will we finally realize the promise of EdTech for changing outcomes for our kids? I think there are ways that AI opens paths that weren't available before. So I think it's incredibly important that we also do the public sector work. By the way, it's not all just using an LLM that someone's been developing commercially. These are a very different array of technologies within AI, but that has to get done as well if we're really going to succeed and thrive in this AI era.”
2024-07-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Biden’s top tech advisor on why AI safety is a “today problem” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We know that there are impacts on work that's started and that it will continue. So those are all issues that require government to play its role. It requires companies. It requires everyone to step up. And that's a lot of the work that we have been doing. And we can talk more about that. But again, in my mind, and I think for the president as well, the reason to do that work is so that we can use it to do big things. Some of those big things are being done by industry. And the new markets that people are creating and the investment that comes in for that, as long as it's done responsibly, we want to see that happen. That's good for the country and it can be good for the world as well. But there are public missions that are not going to be addressed just by this private investment that are ultimately still our responsibility. And when I look at what AI can bring to each of the public missions that we've talked about, I mean, it's everything.”
2024-07-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Biden’s top tech advisor on why AI safety is a “today problem” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“First of all, that's not really what I would say we're hearing. We hear a lot of things. I mean, astonishingly, this is an industry that spends a lot of time saying, please do regulate us. That's an interesting situation. And there's a lot to sort out. But look, I think this is really the point about all the work that we've been doing on AI. It really started with the president and the vice president recognizing it as such a consequential technology, recognizing promise and peril. They were very clear from the beginning about what the government's role is and what governance really looks like here. Number one is managing its risks. And the reason for that is number two, which is to harness its benefits. So government has, I think, two very important roles. It was visible and obvious even before generative AI happened, and it's even more so now that the breadth of applications each come with a bright side and a dark side. And so, of course, there are issues of embedded bias and privacy exposure and issues of safety and security, issues about the deterioration of our information environment.”
2024-07-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Biden’s top tech advisor on why AI safety is a “today problem” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is the national champions argument? I listen to OpenAI or Google or Microsoft or whoever else is in the field and they're like, we're here, we're American companies, we're doing this here. Don't regulate us so much. Don't make us think about compliance costs or safety or anything else. Like we got to go win this fight with China and they are unconstrained and they're spending more money. Let us just do this. Let us get this done. We are American companies. Does that work with you? Does that argument effective?”
2024-07-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Biden’s top tech advisor on why AI safety is a “today problem” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that's actually been a big problem that we are focused on. You know, the irony is that we've actually cut federal R&D in this last cycle in a time in which our primary economic and military emerging competitor is the PRC. They boosted R&D by 10% while we were cutting. And it's a time when it's AI jump ball because a lot of AI advances came from American companies, but they certainly aren't the advantages are not limited to America. And so it's a time when we should be doubling down and we're doing the work to get back on track.”
2024-07-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Biden’s top tech advisor on why AI safety is a “today problem” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Research that's broadly shared through publications, that's a foundation that industry counts on economics has told us forever that that's not returns that can be appropriated by companies. And so it's so important for the public sector to do that. So the question really becomes, then when you step back and you say this huge growth in private sector R&D, how do we keep federal R&D? It doesn't have to be the biggest for sure, but it certainly has to be able to continue to support the growth and the progress that we want in our economy, but then broadly across these public missions. That's why it was a priority for the president from the beginning, and he made really good progress the first couple of years in his administration on building federal R&D. It grew fairly substantially in the first couple of budget cycles. Then with these Republican budget caps from Capitol Hill in the last cycle, R&D took a hit.”
2024-07-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Biden’s top tech advisor on why AI safety is a “today problem” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“America, and I'm glad that they've been able to build on what has been decades now of federal research and development that laid the groundwork for it. Now, it does then create a whole new set of issues. And that really, I think, comes to where you were going, because let's back up. What is the role of federal R&D? Number one, it is the R&D you need to achieve public missions. So it's the R and the D product development that you need for national security. It's the R&D that you need for health, for meeting the climate crisis. It's all the things that we've been talking about. It's also in the process of doing that work, part of what federal R&D does is to lay a very broad foundation of basic research because that's important not just for public missions, but we know that that's something that supports economic growth. It's where students get educated. It's where the fundamentals.”
2024-07-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Biden’s top tech advisor on why AI safety is a “today problem” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With the intensification of the innovation economy, with the information technology industries, that just took off. And it's been amazing and I think really great to see. So the most recent numbers, I believe these are from 2021, were something like $800 billion a year that the United States spends on R&D. Overwhelmingly, that is from private industry. The fastest growth has come from industry and specifically from the information technology industries, other industries like pharmaceuticals and manufacturing R&D intensive, but their pace of growth has been just, you know, the IT industries are wiping out everyone else's growth. And so that's huge. One aspect of that is that's where we're seeing these big tech companies plowing billions of dollars into AI. If that's happening in the world, I'm glad it's happening in America.”
2024-07-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Biden’s top tech advisor on why AI safety is a “today problem” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think you're talking about something that is very much my day job, which is understanding innovation in America. Of course, the federal component of it, which is integral, but we have to look at the whole because that's how the country is going to, that's the ecosystem the country needs to move forward. And let me just step back. Let's zoom back for a minute. The pattern that you're describing is something that has happened in every industrializing economy. If you go back in history, it starts with public investment in R&D. When a country is wealthy enough to put some resources into R&D, it starts doing that because it knows that's where growth and its prosperity can come from. But the point of doing that is actually to seed private activity. And so in our country, like many other developed economies, the moment came where public funding of R&D, which continued to grow, was surpassed by private investment in R&D. And then private investment.”
2024-07-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Biden’s top tech advisor on why AI safety is a “today problem” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT