A bill to regulate powerful generative artificial intelligence (AI) models is moving forward in California, despite opposition from businesses and elected officials who fear such regulation would stifle the nascent technology.
Leading the way, OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, spoke out against SB 1047, saying it risked driving away innovators from the US state and its famous Silicon Valley at a time when “the AI revolution is only just beginning.”
In a letter this week to the bill’s sponsor, Democratic congressman Scott Wiener, OpenAI added that it believes national legislation is preferable to a patchwork of regulations.
The California Assembly is expected to vote on the proposal before the end of the month, and if it passes, it will be up to Governor Gavin Newsom to weigh in.
He has not yet taken a public position, but the Democratic camp is not united on this issue.
“Many of us in Congress believe that SB 1047 is well-intentioned but misinformed,” Nancy Pelosi, one of the party’s most influential voices, said in a statement.
“We want California to be at the forefront of AI in a way that protects consumers, data, intellectual property and more. […] SB 1047 does more harm than good to that end,” the congresswoman added.
“Foreseeable risks”
Dubbed the “Safe Innovation in Pioneering AI Models Act,” the proposal aims to prevent large models from causing major disasters, resulting in large numbers of deaths or significant cybersecurity incidents.
Scott Wiener has nevertheless softened the original text, following in particular the advice of an OpenAI competitor, Anthropic, a start-up also based in San Francisco.
The current version gives California authorities less power than originally intended to hold AI companies accountable or prosecute them.
Developers of large AI models will have to test their systems and simulate cyberattacks, or face fines, but without the threat of criminal consequences.
The creation of a new regulatory agency was scrapped, but the law would still establish a council to set standards for the most advanced models.
“With Congress deadlocked on AI regulation, California must act to anticipate the foreseeable risks presented by rapid advances in AI while encouraging innovation,” Wiener said in a statement.
Generative AI currently makes it possible to produce high-quality content (texts, images, etc.) on simple requests in everyday language. But according to the engineers involved, it has the potential to go much further, and therefore to solve important problems — but also to cause them.
“Unrealistic”
The amended bill is “significantly improved, to the point that we believe its benefits likely outweigh its costs,” Anthropic said in a letter to Gavin Newsom on Wednesday.
“Powerful AI systems hold incredible promise, but they also present very real risks that must be taken very seriously,” computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton, considered the “godfather of AI,” stressed in an op-ed in Fortune magazine.
“SB 1047 represents a very reasonable approach to balancing these concerns,” he continued, saying California is the ideal place to begin regulating the technology.
But organizations representing Google and Meta (Facebook, Instagram), renowned researchers such as Fei-Fei Li of Stanford University, and professors and students at CalTech University have expressed opposition to the bill.
It “imposes burdensome and unrealistic regulations on AI development” and therefore poses “a significant threat to our ability to advance research,” CalTech professor Anima Anandkumar said on X (ex-Twitter).
She believes that it is difficult, if not impossible, to predict all the possible harmful uses of an AI model, especially so-called “open source” versions, whose code can be modified by users.
“The bill neglects the importance of focusing on downstream applications and does not take into account current research on issues inherent to AI models such as bias and hallucinations.”