GenAI — friend or foe?

Generative AI (genAI) could help people live longer and healthier lives, transform education, solve climate change, help protect endangered animals, speed up disaster response, and make work more creative, all while making daily life safer and more humane for billions worldwide. 

Or the technology could lead to massive job losses, boost cybercrime, empower rogue states, arm terrorists, enable scams, spread deepfakes and election manipulation, end democracy, and possibly lead to human extinction. 

Well, humanity? What’s it going to be?

*California’s dreamin’*

Last year, the California State Legislature passed a bill that would have required companies based in the state to perform expensive safety tests for large genAI models and also build in “kill switches” that could stop the technology from going rogue. 

If this kind of thing doesn’t sound like a job for state government, consider that California’s genAI companies include OpenAI, Google, Meta, Apple, Nvidia, Salesforce, Oracle, Anthropic, Anduril, Tesla, and Intel. 

The biggest genAI company outside California is Amazon; it’s based in Washington state, but has its AI division in California.

Anyway, California Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed the bill. Instead, he asked AI experts, including Fei-Fei Li of Stanford, to recommend a policy less onerous to the industry. The resulting Joint California Policy Working Group on AI Frontier Models