Twitter CEO Elon Musk speaks at the “Twitter 2.0: From Conversations to Partnerships,” marketing conference in Miami, Florida, on April 18, 2023.
Chandan Khanna | AFP | Getty Images
After being spotted on Capitol Hill, Elon Musk tweeted that he’d met with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and other lawmakers about artificial intelligence regulation.
“That which affects safety of the public has, over time, become regulated to ensure that companies do not cut corners,” Musk shared early Thursday on Twitter. “AI has great power to do good and evil. Better the former.”
The meeting comes after Schumer recently launched an effort to develop a new framework to foster the technology while mitigating its biggest risks. Schumer’s high-level plans focus on transparency for AI systems, requiring independent experts to test the technologies ahead of public release, and requiring disclosure of the people, places and ways involved in the technology’s development.
Musk has been among the loudest critics of the current fast pace of AI development. He signed an open letter last month from the Future of Life Institute calling for AI labs to enact a six-month pause on “the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4,” referring to the latest iteration of OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Musk, who runs Tesla, SpaceX and Twitter, was a co-founder of OpenAI, but left its board in 2018 and no longer owns a stake. Since then he’s been critical of the company and warned its strayed from its initial goals.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman later addressed the letter at an MIT event, saying while he agreed about the importance of caution and rigorous safety standards, “The letter I don’t think was the optimal way to address it.”
