A partnership between the government and business was portrayed as advantageous to American interests in Mark Zuckerberg’s remarks to the Senate AI Insight Forum.

American AI dominance

CEO of Meta Mark Zuckerberg spoke at the closed-door Senate AI Insight Forum with the aim of promoting sustained American leadership in developing AI as a secure route to delivering the economic benefits of AI.

He expressed his fervent support for corporate America’s involvement in establishing technology norms for both open source and privately developed closed source AI.

Zuckerberg Backs Innovation And Security

Innovation and safety were two of the topics the CEO of Meta discussed right away.

He also emphasized that ChatGPT is not the only type of generative AI.

He promoted regulation of all types of AI, including robots, vision, and natural language processing.

His remarks suggested that he welcomed scrutiny and that there are two problems that need to be resolved:

  1. AI Security
  2. American technological superiority

1. AI Safety

Open source AI was supported by Zuckerberg as a means of democratizing technology.

Because businesses intentionally include safety alignment into their products and because open source is collaborative, it aids in the identification of undesirable or unsafe consequences, he praised both closed source and open source AI as being safe.

However, recent instances cast doubt on the claim that opensource software is safer and more secure.

Falcon 180B, an open source LLM that has no safety precautions at all yet is so powerful that it can compete with Google’s most potent AI, Palm 2, was just released by Hugging Face.

Falcon 180B was made available by Hugging Face as the base version with the idea that it would be up to the users to make it secure.

He said:

“…it’s on companies to make sure we build and deploy products responsibly.

At Meta, we’re building safeguards into our generative AI models and products from the beginning and working with others to collaborate on establishing guardrails.

We think policymakers, academics, civil society and industry should all work together to minimize the potential risks of this new technology, but also to maximize the potential benefits.

…it’s generally accepted that open source software is safer and more secure, because more people can scrutinize it to identify issues and then share and propagate solutions that can then be used to harden systems.”

Mark Zuckerberg

The American Leadership Agenda of Zuckerberg

Additionally, Zuckerberg pushed for an American leadership vision for AI. In terms of AI innovation, America now leads the world. The amount of human resources used by Silicon Valley businesses in the United States eclipses that of any other nation.

The scope of American creativity is unmatched by any other nation or region.

In order to foster a European-based AI sector and further solidify American leadership, OpenAI recently announced that they are creating an office in Dublin.

However, Zuckerberg supported the notion that the US government and business should collaborate in order to sustain technical innovation and leadership in the country.

Zuckerberg Said further:

“…I think it’s important that America continue to lead in this area and define the technical standard that the world uses.

The next leading open source model is out of Abu Dhabi, and other countries are working on this too.

I believe it’s better that the standard is set by American companies that can work with our government to shape these models on important issues.”

3. AI (Artificial intelligence) that is Super intelligent

When referring to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), or superintelligent AI, Mark Zuckerberg was oddly evasive about what should occur.

A type of AI known as AGI is capable of learning and reasoning like a human in a very independent manner. It can also solve complex issues in the same way that people do by drawing on existing knowledge.

Even the definition of AGI is up for debate, though Sam Altman defines it as an AI that can develop science in ways that are not conceivable for humans.

In his conclusion, Zuckerberg expressed optimism about working with the government.

Zuckerberg’s comments suggested to embrace that relationship as a means of assisting the United States to continue holding the technological lead in artificial intelligence, even though it is still too early to suggest what any partnership, oversight, or regulation should look like.