[Senate Hearing 118-037]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
S. Hrg. 118-037
OVERSIGHT OF A.I.: RULES
FOR ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
=======================================================================
HEARING
BEFORE THE
SUBCOMMITTEE ON PRIVACY,
TECHNOLOGY, AND THE LAW
OF THE
COMMITTEE ON THE JUDICIARY
UNITED STATES SENATE
ONE HUNDRED EIGHTEENTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
__________
MAY 16, 2023
__________
Serial No. J-118-16
__________
Printed for the use of the Committee on the Judiciary
[GRAPHIC NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
__________
U.S. GOVERNMENT PUBLISHING OFFICE
52-706 PDF WASHINGTON : 2024
COMMITTEE ON THE JUDICIARY
RICHARD J. DURBIN, Illinois, Chair
DIANNE FEINSTEIN, California LINDSEY O. GRAHAM, South Carolina,
SHELDON WHITEHOUSE, Rhode Island Ranking Member
AMY KLOBUCHAR, Minnesota CHARLES E. GRASSLEY, Iowa
CHRISTOPHER A. COONS, Delaware JOHN CORNYN, Texas
RICHARD BLUMENTHAL, Connecticut MICHAEL S. LEE, Utah
MAZIE K. HIRONO, Hawaii TED CRUZ, Texas
CORY A. BOOKER, New Jersey JOSH HAWLEY, Missouri
ALEX PADILLA, California TOM COTTON, Arkansas
JON OSSOFF, Georgia JOHN KENNEDY, Louisiana
PETER WELCH, Vermont THOM TILLIS, North Carolina
MARSHA BLACKBURN, Tennessee
Joseph Zogby, Chief Counsel and Staff Director
Katherine Nikas, Republican Chief Counsel and Staff Director
Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law
RICHARD BLUMENTHAL, Connecticut, Chair
AMY KLOBUCHAR, Minnesota JOSH HAWLEY, Missouri, Ranking
CHRISTOPHER A. COONS, Delaware Member
MAZIE K. HIRONO, Hawaii JOHN KENNEDY, Louisiana
ALEX PADILLA, California MARSHA BLACKBURN, Tennessee
JON OSSOFF, Georgia MICHAEL S. LEE, Utah
JOHN CORNYN, Texas
David Stoopler, Democratic Chief Counsel
John Ehrett, Republican Chief Counsel
C O N T E N T S
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MAY 16, 2023, 10 A.M.
STATEMENTS OF COMMITTEE MEMBERS
Page
Blumenthal, Hon. Richard, a U.S. Senator from the State of
Connecticut.................................................... 1
Hawley, Hon. Josh, a U.S. Senator from the State of Missouri..... 3
Durbin, Hon. Richard J., a U.S. Senator from the State of
Illinois....................................................... 4
WITNESSES
Witness List..................................................... 57
Altman, Samuel, chief executive officer, OpenAI, San Francisco,
California..................................................... 6
prepared statement........................................... 58
Marcus, Gary, Professor Emeritus, New York University, Vancouver,
British Columbia, Canada....................................... 9
prepared statement........................................... 71
Montgomery, Christina, chief privacy and trust officer, IBM,
Cortlandt Manor, New York...................................... 7
prepared statement........................................... 78
QUESTIONS
Questions submitted to Samuel Altman by:
Chair Durbin................................................. 86
Chair Blumenthal............................................. 87
Senator Kennedy.............................................. 88
Senator Tillis............................................... 89
Questions submitted to Gary Marcus by:
Chair Durbin................................................. 90
Chair Blumenthal............................................. 91
Senator Kennedy.............................................. 92
Questions submitted to Christina Montgomery by:
Chair Durbin................................................. 93
Chair Blumenthal............................................. 94
ANSWERS
Responses of Samuel Altman to questions submitted by:
Chair Durbin................................................. 99
Attachment................................................. 106
Chair Blumenthal............................................. 103
Senator Kennedy.............................................. 95
Senator Tillis............................................... 97
Responses of Gary Marcus to questions submitted by:
Chair Durbin................................................. 167
Chair Blumenthal............................................. 166
Senator Kennedy.............................................. 169
Responses of Christina Montgomery to questions submitted by:
Chair Durbin................................................. 172
Chair Blumenthal............................................. 174
MISCELLANEOUS SUBMISSIONS FOR THE RECORD
Submitted by Chair Blumenthal:
Association for Computing Machinery, letter, May 12, 2023.... 175
Center for AI and Digital Policy, letter, May 11, 2023....... 187
Center for AI and Digital Policy, letter to The Economist,
May 11, 2023............................................... 189
Center for AI and Digital Policy, report, April 2023......... 190
Chamber of Progress, letter, May 16, 2023.................... 1456
Future of Life Institute, memorandum, May 15, 2023........... 1459
IEEE-USA, letter, May 22, 2023............................... 1462
Public Knowledge, letter, May 16, 2023....................... 1464
Stability AI, letter, May 13, 2023........................... 1466
Stackhouse, Ed, Alphabet Workers Union member, letter, May
15, 2023................................................... 1481
OVERSIGHT OF A.I.: RULES
FOR ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
----------
TUESDAY, MAY 16, 2023
United States Senate,
Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law,
Committee on the Judiciary,
Washington, DC.
The Subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 10 a.m., in
Room 226, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Hon. Richard
Blumenthal, Chair of the Subcommittee, presiding.
Present: Senators Blumenthal [presiding], Klobuchar, Coons,
Hirono, Padilla, Ossoff, Hawley, Kennedy, and Blackburn.
Also present: Chair Durbin and Senators Booker, Welch, and
Graham.
OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. RICHARD BLUMENTHAL,
A U.S. SENATOR FROM THE STATE OF CONNECTICUT
Chair Blumenthal. Welcome to the hearing of the Privacy,
Technology, and the Law Subcommittee. I thank my partner in
this effort, Senator Hawley, Ranking Member, and I particularly
want to thank Senator Durbin, Chairman of the Judiciary
Committee, and he will be speaking shortly. This hearing is on
the oversight of artificial intelligence, the first in a series
of hearings intended to write the rules of AI. Our goal is to
demystify and hold accountable those new technologies to avoid
some of the mistakes of the past. And now for some introductory
remarks.
[AI-generated audio segment is played.]
``Too often, we have seen what happens when technology
outpaces regulation: the unbridled exploitation of personal
data, the proliferation of disinformation, and the deepening of
societal inequalities. We have seen how algorithmic biases can
perpetuate discrimination and prejudice and how the lack of
transparency can undermine public trust. This is not the future
we want.''
Chair Blumenthal. If you were listening from home, you
might have thought that voice was mine and the words from me.
But, in fact, that voice was not mine, the words were not mine,
and the audio was an AI voice-cloning software trained on my
floor speeches. The remarks were written by ChatGPT when it was
asked how I would open this hearing, and you heard just now the
result.
I asked ChatGPT, ``Why did you pick those themes and that
content?'' And it answered, and I'm quoting, ``Blumenthal has a
strong record in advocating for consumer protection and civil
rights. He has been vocal about issues such as data privacy and
the potential for discrimination in algorithmic decisionmaking.
Therefore, this statement emphasizes these aspects.''
Mr. Altman, I appreciate ChatGPT's endorsement. In all
seriousness, this apparent reasoning is pretty impressive. I am
sure that we'll look back in a decade and view ChatGPT and GPT-
4 like we do the first cell phone, those big clunky things that
we used to carry around. But we recognize that we are on the
verge, really, of a new era.
The audio, and my playing it, may strike you as curious or
humorous, but what reverberated in my mind was, ``What if I had
asked it--and what if it had provided--an endorsement of
Ukraine surrendering or Vladimir Putin's leadership?'' That
would have been really frightening. And the prospect is more
than a little scary, to use the word, Mr. Altman, you have
used, yourself. And I think you have been very constructive in
calling attention to the pitfalls as well as the promise, and
that's the reason why we wanted you to be here today, and we
thank you and our other witnesses for joining us.
For several months now, the public has been fascinated with
GPT, DALLE, and other AI tools. These examples, like the
homework done by ChatGPT, or the articles and op-eds that it
can write, feel like novelties. But the underlying advancements
of this era are more than just research experiments. They are
no longer fantasies of science fiction. They are real and
present.
The promises of curing cancer, or developing new
understandings of physics and biology, or modeling climate and
weather--all very encouraging and hopeful. But we also know the
potential harms, and we've seen them already: weaponized
disinformation, housing discrimination, harassment of women,
and impersonation fraud, voice cloning, deepfakes. These are
the potential risks, despite the other rewards.
And for me, perhaps the biggest nightmare is the looming
new industrial revolution, the displacement of millions of
workers, the loss of huge numbers of jobs, the need to prepare
for this new industrial revolution in skill training and
relocation that may be required. And already, industry leaders
are calling attention to those challenges. To quote ChatGPT,
``This is not necessarily the future that we want. We need to
maximize the good over the bad.''
Congress has a choice now. We had the same choice when we
faced social media. We failed to seize that moment. The result
is predators on the internet, toxic content, exploiting
children, creating dangers for them. And Senator Blackburn and
I and others like Senator Durbin on the Judiciary Committee are
trying to deal with it, Kids Online Safety Act. But Congress
failed to meet the moment on social media. Now we have the
obligation to do it on AI before the threats and the risks
become real.
Sensible safeguards are not in opposition to innovation.
Accountability is not a burden. Far from it. They are the
foundation of how we can move ahead while protecting public
trust. They are how we can lead the world in technology and
science but also in promoting our democratic values. Otherwise,
in the absence of that trust, I think we may well lose both.
These are sophisticated technology, but there are basic
expectations common in our law. We can start with transparency.
AI companies ought to be required to test their systems,
disclose known risks, and allow independent researcher access.
We can establish scorecards and nutrition labels to encourage
competition based on safety and trustworthiness, limitations on
use.
There are places where the risk of AI is so extreme that we
ought to impose restriction or even ban their use, especially
when it comes to commercial invasions of privacy for profit and
decisions that affect people's livelihoods and, of course,
accountability or liability. When AI companies and their
clients cause harm, they should be held liable. We should not
repeat our past mistakes. For example, Section 230. Forcing
companies to think ahead and be responsible for the
ramifications of their business decisions can be the most
powerful tool of all. Garbage in, garbage out. The principle
still applies. We ought to beware of the garbage, whether it's
going into these platforms or coming out of them.
And the ideas that we develop in this hearing, I think,
will provide a solid path forward. I look forward to discussing
them with you today, and I will just finish on this note: The
AI industry doesn't have to wait for Congress. I hope there are
ideas and feedback from this discussion and from the industry
and voluntary action such as we've seen lacking in many social
media platforms, and the consequences have been huge.
So, I'm hoping that we will elevate rather than have a race
to the bottom, and I think these hearings will be an important
part of this conversation. This one is only the first. The
Ranking Member and I have agreed there should be more, and
we're going to invite other industry leaders. Some have
committed to come--experts, academics--and the public, we hope,
will participate.
And with that, I will turn to the Ranking Member, Senator
Hawley.
OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. JOSH HAWLEY,
A U.S. SENATOR FROM THE STATE OF MISSOURI
Senator Hawley. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, and
thanks to the witnesses for being here. I appreciate that
several of you had long journeys to make in order to be here. I
appreciate you making the time. I look forward to your
testimony. I want to thank Senator Blumenthal for convening
this hearing, for being a leader on this topic.
You know, a year ago, we couldn't have had this hearing
because the technology that we're talking about had not burst
into public consciousness. That gives us a sense, I think, of
just how rapidly this technology that we're talking about today
is changing and evolving and transforming our world right
before our very eyes. I was talking with someone just last
night, a researcher in the field of psychiatry, who was
pointing out to me that the ChatGPT and generative AI, these
large language models--it's really like the invention of the
internet, in scale, at least. At least--and potentially far,
far more significant than that. We could be looking at one of
the most significant technological innovations in human
history.
And I think my question is: What kind of an innovation is
it going to be? Is it going to be like the printing press that
diffused knowledge and power and learning widely across the
landscape, that empowered ordinary, everyday individuals, that
led to greater flourishing, that led, above all, to greater
liberty? Or is it going to be more like the atom bomb--huge
technological breakthrough, but the consequences, severe,
terrible, continue to haunt us to this day?
I don't know the answer to that question. I don't think any
of us in the room know the answer to that question, because I
think the answer has not yet been written. And to a certain
extent, it's up to us here and to us, as the American people,
to write the answer. What kind of technology will this be? How
will we use it to better our lives? How will we use it to
actually harness the power of technological innovation for the
good of the American people, for the liberty of the American
people, not for the power of the few?
You know, I was reminded of the psychologist and writer
Carl Jung, who said, at the beginning of the last century, that
our ability for technological innovation, our capacity for
technological revolution, had far outpaced our ethical and
moral ability to apply and harness the technology we developed.
That was a century ago. I think the story of the 20th century
largely bore him out.
And I just wonder, what will we say, as we look back at
this moment, about these new technologies, about generative AI,
about these language models, and about the host of other AI
capacities that are even right now under development, not just
in this country but in China, the countries of our adversaries,
and all around the world? And I think the question that Jung
posed is really the question that faces us: Will we strike that
balance between technological innovation and our ethical and
moral responsibility to humanity, to liberty, to the freedom of
this country? And I hope that today's hearing will take us a
step closer to that answer. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Chair Blumenthal. Thanks. Thanks, Senator Hawley. I'm going
to turn to the Chairman of the Judiciary Committee and the
Ranking Member, Senator Graham, if they have opening remarks,
as well.
OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. RICHARD J. DURBIN,
A U.S. SENATOR FROM THE STATE OF ILLINOIS
Chair Durbin. Yes, Mr. Chairman. Thank you very much, and
Senator Hawley, as well. Last week in this Committee, full
Committee, Senate Judiciary Committee, we dealt with an issue
that had been waiting for attention for almost two decades, and
that is what to do with the social media when it comes to the
abuse of children. We had four bills, initially, that were
considered by this Committee, and--what may be history in the
making--we passed all four bills with unanimous roll calls.
Unanimous roll calls.
I can't remember another time when we've done that on an
issue that important. It's an indication, I think, of the
important position of this Committee in the national debate on
issues that affect every single family and affect our future in
a profound way.
1989 was a historic watershed year in America because
that's when ``Seinfeld'' arrived, and we had a sitcom which was
supposedly about little or nothing, which turned out to be
enduring. I like to watch it, obviously, and I always marvel
when they show the phones that he used in 1989, and I think
about those in comparison to what we carry around in our
pockets today. It's a dramatic change. And I guess the
question, as I look at that, is: Does this change in phone
technology that we've witnessed through this sitcom really
exemplify a profound change in America? Still unanswered.
But the basic question we face is whether or not the issue
of AI is a quantitative change in technology or a qualitative
change. The suggestions that I've heard from experts in the
field suggest it's qualitative. Is AI fundamentally different?
Is it a game changer? Is it so disruptive that we need to treat
it differently than other forms of innovation? That's the
starting point.
And the second starting point is one that's humbling, and
that is the fact that when you look at the record of Congress
in dealing with innovation, technology, and rapid change, we're
not designed for that. In fact, the Senate was not created for
that purpose but just the opposite: slow things down, take a
harder look at it, don't react to public sentiment, make sure
you're doing the right thing.
Well, I've heard of the potential, the positive potential
of AI, and it is enormous. You can go through lists of the
deployment of technology that would say that an idea you can
sketch for a website on a napkin can generate functioning code.
Pharmaceutical companies could use the technology to identify
new candidates to treat disease. The list goes on and on.
And then, of course, the danger, and it's profound, as
well. So, I'm glad that this hearing has taken place. I think
it's important for all of us to participate. I'm glad that it's
a bipartisan approach. We're going to have to scramble to keep
up with the pace of innovation in terms of our Government,
public response to it, but this is a great start. Thank you,
Mr. Chairman.
Chair Blumenthal. Thanks. Thanks, Senator Durbin. It is
very much a bipartisan approach, very deeply and broadly
bipartisan. And in that spirit, I'm going to turn to my friend,
Senator Graham.
Senator Graham. In the spirit of wanting to hear from them,
I'm going to not say anything, and thank you both for that.
Chair Blumenthal. Thank you. That was not written by AI,
for sure.
[Laughter.]
Chair Blumenthal. Let me introduce, now, the witnesses.
We're very grateful to you for being here. Sam Altman is the
cofounder and CEO of OpenAI, the AI research and deployment
company behind ChatGPT and DALLE. Mr. Altman was president of
the early stage startup accelerator Y Combinator from 1914--I'm
sorry, 2014 to 2019. OpenAI was founded in 2015.
Christina Montgomery is IBM's vice president and chief
privacy and trust officer, overseeing the company's global
privacy program policies, compliance, and strategy. She also
chairs IBM's AI Ethics Board, a multidisciplinary team
responsible for the governance of AI and emerging technologies.
Christina has served in various roles at IBM, including
corporate secretary to the company's board of directors. She is
a global leader in AI ethics and governance, and Ms. Montgomery
also is a member of the United States Chamber of Commerce AI
Commission and the United States National AI Advisory
Committee, which was established in 2022 to advise the
President and the National AI Initiative Office on a range of
topics related to AI.
Gary Marcus is a leading voice in artificial intelligence.
He's a scientist, bestselling author, and entrepreneur; founder
of the robust AI and geometric AI acquired by Uber, if I'm not
mistaken; and emeritus professor of psychology and neuroscience
at NYU. Mr. Marcus is well known for his challenges to
contemporary AI, anticipating many of the current limitations
decades in advance, and for his research in human language
development and cognitive neuroscience. Thank you for being
here.
And as you may know, our custom on the Judiciary Committee
is to swear in our witnesses before they testify, so if you
would all please rise and raise your right hand.
[Witnesses are sworn in.]
Chair Blumenthal. Thank you. Mr. Altman, we're going to
begin with you, if that's okay.
STATEMENT OF SAMUEL ALTMAN, CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER, OPENAI,
SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA
Mr. Altman. Thank you. Thank you, Chairman Blumenthal,
Ranking Member Hawley, Members of the Judiciary Committee.
Thank you for the opportunity to speak to you today about large
neural networks. It's really an honor to be here, even more so
in the moment than I expected. My name is Sam Altman. I'm the
chief executive officer of OpenAI.
OpenAI was founded on the belief that artificial
intelligence has the potential to improve nearly every aspect
of our lives, but also that it creates serious risks we have to
work together to manage. We're here because people love this
technology. We think it can be a printing press moment. We have
to work together to make it so.
OpenAI is an unusual company, and we set it up that way
because AI is an unusual technology. We are governed by a
nonprofit, and our activities are driven by our mission and our
charter, which commit us to working to ensure that the broad
distribution of the benefits of AI and to maximizing the safety
of AI systems. We are working to build tools that one day can
help us make new discoveries and address some of humanity's
biggest challenges, like climate change and curing cancer.
Our current systems aren't yet capable of doing these
things, but it has been immensely gratifying to watch many
people around the world get so much value from what these
systems can already do today. We love seeing people use our
tools to create, to learn, to be more productive. We're very
optimistic that there are going to be fantastic jobs in the
future and that current jobs can get much better.
We also love seeing what developers are doing to improve
lives. For example, Be My Eyes used our new multimodal
technology in GPT-4 to help visually impaired individuals
navigate their environment. We believe that the benefits of the
tools we have deployed so far vastly outweigh the risks, but
ensuring their safety is vital to our work, and we make
significant efforts to ensure that safety is built into our
systems at all levels.
Before releasing any new system, OpenAI conducts extensive
testing, engages external experts for detailed reviews and
independent audits, improves the model's behavior, and
implements robust safety and monitoring systems. Before we
released GPT-4, our latest model, we spent over 6 months
conducting extensive evaluations, external red teaming, and
dangerous capability testing.
We are proud of the progress that we made. GPT-4 is more
likely to respond helpfully and truthfully and refuse harmful
requests than any other widely deployed model of similar
capability; however, we think that regulatory intervention by
governments will be critical to mitigate the risks of
increasingly powerful models. For example, the U.S. Government
might consider a combination of licensing and testing
requirements for development and release of AI models above a
threshold of capabilities.
There are several other areas I mention in my written
testimony where I believe that companies like ours can partner
with governments, including ensuring that the most powerful AI
models adhere to a set of safety requirements, facilitating
processes to develop and update safety measures, and examining
opportunities for global coordination. And as you mentioned, I
think it's important that companies have their own
responsibility here, no matter what Congress does.
This is a remarkable time to be working on artificial
intelligence. But as this technology advances, we understand
that people are anxious about how it could change the way we
live. We are, too. But we believe that we can and must work
together to identify and manage the potential downsides so that
we can all enjoy the tremendous upsides.
It is essential that powerful AI is developed with
democratic values in mind, and this means that U.S. leadership
is critical. I believe that we will be able to mitigate the
risks in front of us and really capitalize on this technology's
potential to grow the U.S. economy and the world's. And I look
forward to working with you all to meet this moment, and I look
forward to answering your questions. Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Altman appears as a
submission for the record.]
Chair Blumenthal. Thank you, Mr. Altman. Ms. Montgomery?
STATEMENT OF CHRISTINA MONTGOMERY, CHIEF PRIVACY AND TRUST
OFFICER, IBM, CORTLANDT MANOR, NEW YORK
Ms. Montgomery. Chairman Blumenthal, Ranking Member Hawley,
and Members of the Subcommittee, thank you for today's
opportunity to present. AI is not new, but it's certainly
having a moment. Recent breakthroughs in generative AI and the
technology's dramatic surge in the public attention has
rightfully raised serious questions at the heart of today's
hearing. What are AI's potential impacts on society? What do we
do about bias? What about misinformation, misuse, or harmful
content generated by AI systems? Senators, these are the right
questions, and I applaud you for convening today's hearing to
address them head on.
While AI may be having its moment, the moment for
government to play a role has not passed us by. This period of
focused public attention on AI is precisely the time to define
and build the right guardrails to protect people and their
interests. But at its core, AI is just a tool, and tools can
serve different purposes. To that end, IBM urges Congress to
adopt a precision regulation approach to AI. This means
establishing rules to govern the deployment of AI in specific
use cases, not regulating the technology itself.
Such an approach would involve four things:
First, different rules for different risks. The strongest
regulation should be applied to use cases with the greatest
risks to people and society.
Second, clearly defining risks. There must be clear
guidance on AI uses or categories of AI-supported activity that
are inherently high risk. This common definition is key to
enabling a clear understanding of what regulatory requirements
will apply in different use cases and contexts.
Third, be transparent. So, AI shouldn't be hidden.
Consumers should know when they're interacting with an AI
system and that they have recourse to engage with a real person
should they so desire. No person anywhere should be tricked
into interacting with an AI system.
And finally, showing the impact. For higher-risk use cases,
companies should be required to conduct impact assessments that
show how their systems perform against tests for bias and other
ways that they could potentially impact the public and to
attest that they've done so. By following risk-based, use case-
specific approach at the core of precision regulation, Congress
can mitigate the potential risks of AI without hindering
innovation.
But businesses also play a critical role in ensuring the
responsible deployment of AI. Companies active in developing or
using AI must have strong internal governance, including, among
other things, designating a lead AI ethics official responsible
for an organization's trustworthy AI strategy, standing up an
ethics board or a similar function as a centralized
clearinghouse for resources to help guide implementation of
that strategy. IBM has taken both of these steps, and we
continue calling on our industry peers to follow suit.
Our AI ethics board plays a critical role in overseeing
internal AI governance processes, creating reasonable
guardrails to ensure we introduce technology into the world in
a responsible and safe manner. It provides centralized
governance and accountability while still being flexible enough
to support decentralized initiatives across IBM's global
operations. We do this because we recognize that society grants
our license to operate, and with AI, the stakes are simply too
high. We must build, not undermine, the public trust.
The era of AI cannot be another era of move fast and break
things. But we don't have to slam the brakes on innovation,
either. These systems are within our control today, as are the
solutions. What we need at this pivotal moment is clear,
reasonable policy and sound guardrails. These guardrails should
be matched with meaningful steps by the business community to
do their part. Congress and the business community must work
together to get this right. The American people deserve no
less. Thank you for your time, and I look forward to your
questions.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Montgomery appears as a
submission for the record.]
Chair Blumenthal. Thank you. Professor Marcus?
STATEMENT OF GARY MARCUS, PROFESSOR EMERITUS, NEW YORK
UNIVERSITY, VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA,
CANADA
Professor Marcus. Thank you, Senators. Today's meeting is
historic. I'm profoundly grateful to be here. I come as a
scientist, someone who's founded AI companies, and as someone
who genuinely loves AI but who is increasingly worried. There
are benefits, but we don't yet know whether they will outweigh
the risks.
Fundamentally, these new systems are going to be
destabilizing. They can and will create persuasive lies at a
scale humanity has never seen before. Outsiders will use them
to affect our elections, insiders to manipulate our markets and
our political systems. Democracy itself is threatened. Chatbots
will also clandestinely shape our opinions, potentially
exceeding what social media can do. Choices about data sets
that AI companies use will have enormous unseen influence.
Those who choose the data will make the rules, shaping society
in subtle but powerful ways.
There are other risks, too, many stemming from the inherent
unreliability of current systems. A law professor, for example,
was accused by a chatbot of sexual harassment: untrue. And it
pointed to a Washington Post article that didn't even exist.
The more that that happens, the more that anybody can deny
anything. As one prominent lawyer told me on Friday, defendants
are starting to claim that plaintiffs are making up legitimate
evidence. These sorts of allegations undermine the abilities of
juries to decide what or who to believe and contribute to the
undermining of democracy.
Poor medical advice could have serious consequences, too.
An open-source large language model recently seems to have
played a role in a person's decision to take their own life.
The large language model asked the human, ``If you wanted to
die, why didn't you do it earlier?''--and then followed up
with, ``Were you thinking of me when you overdosed?''--without
ever referring the patient to the human help that was obviously
needed. Another system rushed out and made available to
millions of children--told a person posing as a 13-year-old how
to lie to her parents about a trip with a 31-year-old man.
Further threats continue to emerge regularly. A month after
GPT-4 was released, OpenAI released ChatGPT plugins, which
quickly led others to develop something called Auto-GPT, with
direct access to the internet, the ability to write source
code, and increased powers of automation. This may well have
drastic and difficult-to-predict security consequences. What
criminals are going to do here is to create counterfeit people.
It's hard to even envision the consequences of that. We have
built machines that are like bulls in a china shop: powerful,
reckless, and difficult to control.
We all, more or less, agree on the values we would like for
our AI systems to honor. We want, for example, for our systems
to be transparent, to protect our privacy, to be free of bias,
and above all else, to be safe. But current systems are not in
line with these values. Current systems are not transparent,
they do not adequately protect our privacy, and they continue
to perpetuate bias. And even their makers don't entirely
understand how they work.
Most of all, we cannot remotely guarantee that they're
safe, and hope, here, is not enough. The Big Tech companies'
preferred plan boils down to ``Trust us.'' But why should we?
The sums of money at stake are mindboggling. Missions drift.
OpenAI's original mission statement proclaimed, ``Our goal
is to advance AI in the way that is most likely to benefit
humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate
financial return.'' Seven years later, they're largely beholden
to Microsoft, embroiled in part in an epic battle of search
engines that routinely make things up, and that's forced
Alphabet to rush out products and deemphasize safety. Humanity
has taken a back seat.
AI is moving incredibly fast, with lots of potential but
also lots of risks. We obviously need government involved, and
we need the tech companies involved, both big and small. But we
also need independent scientists, not just so that we
scientists can have a voice, but so that we can participate
directly in addressing the problems and evaluating solutions--
and not just after products are released, but before. And I'm
glad that Sam mentioned that. We need tight collaboration
between independent scientists and governments, in order to
hold the companies' feet to the fire.
Allowing independent scientists access to these systems
before they are widely released, as part of a clinical trial
like safety evaluation, is a vital first step. Ultimately, we
may need something like CERN: global, international, and
neutral, but focused on AI safety rather than high-energy
physics. We have unprecedented opportunities here, but we are
also facing a perfect storm of corporate irresponsibility,
widespread deployment, lack of adequate regulation, and
inherent unreliability.
AI is among the most world-changing technologies ever,
already changing things more rapidly than almost any technology
in history. We acted too slowly with social media. Many
unfortunate decisions got locked in, with lasting consequence.
The choices we make now will have lasting effects for decades,
maybe even centuries. The very fact that we are here today in
bipartisan fashion to discuss these matters gives me some hope.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
[The prepared statement of Professor Marcus appears as a
submission for the record.]
Chair Blumenthal. Thanks very much, Professor Marcus. We're
going to have 7-minute rounds of questioning, and I will begin.
First of all, Professor Marcus, we are here today because
we do face that perfect storm. Some of us might characterize it
more like a bomb in a china shop, not a bull. And as Senator
Hawley indicated, there are precedents here, not only the
atomic warfare era, but also the Genome Project, the research
on genetics, where there was international cooperation as a
result. And we want to avoid those past mistakes, as I
indicated in my opening statement, that were committed on
social media. That is precisely the reason we are here today.
ChatGPT makes mistakes. All AI does. And it can be a
convincing liar, what people call hallucinations. That might be
an innocent problem in the opening of a Judiciary Subcommittee
hearing where a voice is impersonated--mine, in this instance--
or quotes from research papers that don't exist. But ChatGPT
and Bard are willing to answer questions about life-or-death
matters: for example, drug interactions. And those kinds of
mistakes can be deeply damaging.
I'm interested in how we can have reliable information
about the accuracy and trustworthiness of these models and how
we can create competition and consumer disclosures that reward
greater accuracy. The National Institute of Standards and
Technology actually already has an AI accuracy test, the face
recognition vendor test. It doesn't solve for all the issues
with facial recognition, but the scorecard does provide useful
information about the capabilities and flaws of these systems.
So, there's work on models to assure accuracy and integrity.
My question--let me begin with you, Mr. Altman--is: Should
we consider independent testing labs to provide scorecards and
nutrition labels, or the equivalent of nutrition labels,
packaging that indicates to people whether or not the content
can be trusted, what the ingredients are, and what the garbage
going in may be, because it could result in garbage going out?
Mr. Altman. Yes. I think that's a great idea. I think that
companies should put their own sort of, you know, ``Here are
the results of our tests of our model before we release it,
here's where it has weaknesses, here's where it has
strengths.'' But also, independent audits for that are very
important.
These models are getting more accurate over time. You know,
as we have, I think, said as loudly as anyone, this technology
is in its early stages. It definitely still makes mistakes. We
find that people, that users are pretty sophisticated and
understand where the mistakes are or are likely to be, that
they need to be responsible for verifying what the models say,
that they go off and check it. I worry that, as the models get
better and better, the users can have sort of less and less of
their own discriminating thought process around it. But I think
users are more capable than we often give them credit for in
conversations like this.
I think a lot of disclosures--which, if you've used
ChatGPT, you'll see--about the inaccuracies of the model are
also important. And I'm excited for a world where companies
publish, with the models, information about how they behave,
where the inaccuracies are, and independent agencies or
companies provide that, as well. I think it's a great idea.
Chair Blumenthal. I alluded, in my opening remarks, to the
jobs issue, the economic effects on employment. I think you
have said, in fact, and I'm going to quote, ``Development of
superhuman machine intelligence is probably the greatest threat
to the continued existence of humanity,'' end quote. You may
have had in mind the effect on jobs, which is really my biggest
nightmare, in the long term. Let me ask you what your biggest
nightmare is and whether you share that concern.
Mr. Altman. Like with all technological revolutions, I
expect there to be significant impact on jobs, but exactly what
that impact looks like is very difficult to predict. If we went
back to the other side of a previous technological revolution,
talking about the jobs that exist on the other side--you know,
you can go back and read books of this. It's what people said
at the time. It's difficult. I believe that there will be far
greater jobs on the other side of this and that the jobs of
today will get better.
I think it's important--first of all, I think it's
important to understand and think about GPT-4 as a tool, not a
creature, which is easy to get confused. And it's a tool that
people have a great deal of control over, in how they use it.
And, second, GPT-4 and other systems like it are good at doing
tasks, not jobs. And so you see already people that are using
GPT-4 to do their job much more efficiently by helping them
with tasks.
Now, GPT-4 will, I think, entirely automate away some jobs,
and it will create new ones that we believe will be much
better. Again, my understanding of the history of technology is
one long technological revolution, not a bunch of different
ones put together. But this has been continually happening. As
our quality of life raises and as machines and tools that we
create can help us live better lives, the bar raises for what
we do, and our human ability and what we spend our time going
after goes after more ambitious, more satisfying projects.
So, there will be an impact on jobs. We try to be very
clear about that. And I think it will require partnership
between the industry and government, but mostly action by
government, to figure out how we want to mitigate that. But I'm
very optimistic about how great the jobs of the future will be.
Chair Blumenthal. Thank you. Let me ask Ms. Montgomery and
Professor Marcus for your reactions to those questions, as
well. Ms. Montgomery?
Ms. Montgomery. On the jobs point. Yes. I mean, well, it's
a hugely important question, and it's one that we've been
talking about for a really long time at IBM. You know, we do
believe that AI--and we've said it for a long time--is going to
change every job. New jobs will be created, many more jobs will
be transformed, and some jobs will transition away. I'm a
personal example of a job that didn't exist when I joined IBM,
and I have a team of AI governance professionals who are in new
roles that we created, you know, as early as 3 years ago. I
mean, they're new and they're growing.
So, I think the most important thing that we could be doing
and can and should be doing now is to prepare the workforce of
today and the workforce of tomorrow for partnering with AI
technologies and using them. And we've been very involved for
years now in doing that, in focusing on skills-based hiring, in
educating for the skills of the future. Our SkillsBuild
platform has 7 million learners and over 1,000 courses
worldwide focused on skills. And we've pledged to train 30
million individuals by 2030 in the skills that are needed for
society today.
Chair Blumenthal. Thank you. Professor Marcus?
Professor Marcus. May I go back to the first question, as
well?
Chair Blumenthal. Absolutely.
Professor Marcus. On the subject of nutrition labels, I
think we absolutely need to do that. I think that there are
some technical challenges and that building proper nutrition
labels goes hand in hand with transparency. The biggest
scientific challenge in understanding these models is how they
generalize. What do they memorize and what new things do they
do? The more that there's in the data set, for example, the
thing that you want to test accuracy on, the less you can get a
proper read on that. So, it's important, first of all, that
scientists be part of that process, and, second, that we have
much greater transparency about what actually goes into these
systems.
If we don't know what's in them, then we don't know exactly
how well they're doing when we give something new, and we don't
know how good a benchmark that will be for something that's
entirely novel. So, I could go into that more, but I want to
flag that.
Second is, on jobs, past performance history is not a
guarantee of the future. It has always been the case in the
past that we have had more jobs, that new jobs, new professions
come in as new technologies come in. I think this one's going
to be different, and the real question is, over what time
scale? Is it going to be 10 years? Is it going to be 100 years?
And I don't think anybody knows the answer to that question.
I think, in the long run, so-called artificial general
intelligence really will replace a large fraction of human
jobs. We're not that close to artificial general intelligence,
despite all of the media hype and so forth. I would say that
what we have right now is just a small sampling of the AI that
we will build. In 20 years, people will laugh at this, as I
think it was Senator Hawley made the--but maybe Senator Durbin
made the example about this--it was Senator Durbin--made the
example about cell phones. When we look back at the AI of
today, 20 years ago, we'll be like, ``Wow, that stuff was
really unreliable. It couldn't really do planning, which is an
important technical aspect. Its reasoning abilities were
limited.''
But when we get to AGI, or artificial general intelligence,
maybe let's say it's 50 years, that really is going to have, I
think, profound effects on labor. And there's just no way
around that. And last, I don't know if I'm allowed to do this,
but I will note that Sam's worst fear I do not think is
employment. And he never told us what his worst fear actually
is. And I think it's germane to find out.
Chair Blumenthal. Thank you. I'm going to ask Mr. Altman if
he cares to respond.
Mr. Altman. Yes. Look, we have tried to be very clear about
the magnitude of the risks here. I think jobs and employment
and what we're all going to do with our time really matters. I
agree that when we get to very powerful systems, the landscape
will change. I think I'm just more optimistic that we are
incredibly creative, and we find new things to do with better
tools, and that will keep happening.
My worst fears are that we cause significant--we, the
field, the technology, the industry cause significant harm to
the world. I think that could happen a lot of different ways.
It's why we started the company. It's a big part of why I'm
here today and why we've been here in the past and we've been
able to spend some time with you.
I think if this technology goes wrong, it can go quite
wrong, and we want to be vocal about that. We want to work with
the Government to prevent that from happening. But we try to be
very clear-eyed about what the downside case is and the work
that we have to do to mitigate that.
Chair Blumenthal. Thank you. And our hope is that the rest
of the industry will follow the example that you and IBM, Ms.
Montgomery, have set by coming today and meeting with us, as
you have done privately, in helping to guide what we're going
to do so that we can target the harms and avoid unintended
consequences, to the good. Thank you.
Senator Hawley. I----
Chair Blumenthal. Senator Hawley.
Senator Hawley. Thank you, again, Mr. Chairman. Thanks to
the witnesses for being here. Mr. Altman, I think you grew up
in St. Louis, if I'm----
Mr. Altman. I did.
Senator Hawley [continuing]. Not mistaken. It's great to
see a fellow----
Mr. Altman. Missouri's a great place.
Senator Hawley [continuing]. Missourian here. It is. Thank
you. I want that noted, especially underlined in the record:
Missouri is a great place. That is the takeaway from today's
hearing. Maybe we'll just stop there, Mr. Chairman.
Let me ask you--Mr. Altman, I think I'll start with you,
and I'll just preface this by saying my questions here are an
attempt to get my head around and to ask all of you to help us
to get our heads around what this generative AI--particularly
the large language models--what it can do, because I'm trying
to understand its capacities and then its significance. So, I'm
looking at a paper here entitled, ``Large Language Models
Trained on Media Diets Can Predict Public Opinion.''
This was just posted about a month ago. The authors are
Chu, Andreas, Ansolabehere, and Roy, and their conclusion--this
work was done at MIT and then also at Google. Their conclusion
is that large language models can indeed predict public
opinion, and they go through and model why this is the case,
and they conclude ultimately that an AI system can predict
human survey responses by adapting a pretrained language model
to subpopulation-specific media diets. In other words, you can
feed the model a particular set of media inputs and it can,
with remarkable accuracy--and the paper goes into this--
predict, then, what people's opinions will be.
I want to think about this in the context of elections. If
these large language models can, even now, based on the
information we put into them, quite accurately predict public
opinion, you know, ahead of time--I mean, predict, it's before
you even ask the public these questions--what will happen when
entities, whether it's corporate entities or whether it's
governmental entities or whether it's campaigns or whether it's
foreign actors, take this survey information, these predictions
about public opinion, and then fine-tune strategies to elicit
certain responses, certain behavioral responses?
I mean, we already know--this Committee has heard
testimony, I think 3 years ago, now, about the effect of
something as prosaic, it now seems, as Google Search, the
effect that this has on voters in an election, particularly
undecided voters in the final days of an election who maybe try
to get information from Google Search, and what an enormous
effect--the ranking of the Google search, the articles that it
returns is going to have an enormous effect on an undecided
voter. This, of course, is orders of magnitude, far more
powerful, far more significant, far more directed, if you like.
So, Mr. Altman, maybe you can help me understand here what
some of the significance of this is. Should we be concerned
about models that can--large language models that can predict
survey opinion and then can help organizations into these fine-
tune strategies to elicit behaviors from voters? Should we be
worried about this for our elections?
Mr. Altman. Yes. Thank you, Senator Hawley, for the
question. It's one of my areas of greatest concern: the more
general ability of these models to manipulate, to persuade, to
provide sort of one-on-one, you know, interactive
disinformation. I think that's like a broader version of what
you're talking about, but given that we're going to face an
election next year and these models are getting better, I think
this is a significant area of concern.
I think there's a lot of policies that companies can
voluntarily adopt, and I'm happy to talk about what we do
there. I do think some regulation would be quite wise on this
topic. Someone mentioned earlier--it's something we really
agree with. People need to know if they're talking to an AI, if
content that they're looking at might be generated or might
not. I think it's a great thing to do, is to make that clear.
I think we also will need rules, guidelines about what's
expected in terms of disclosure from a company providing a
model that could have these sorts of abilities that you talk
about. So, I'm nervous about it. I think people are able to
adapt quite quickly. When Photoshop came onto the scene a long
time ago, you know, for a while people were really quite fooled
by Photoshopped images and then pretty quickly developed an
understanding that images might be Photoshopped. This will be
like that, but on steroids. And the interactivity, the ability
to really model, predict humans well, as you talked about, I
think is going to require a combination of companies doing the
right thing, regulation, and public education.
Senator Hawley. Professor Marcus, do you want to address
this?
Professor Marcus. Yes. I'd like to add two things. One is,
in the appendix to my remarks, I have two papers to make you
even more concerned. One is in The Wall Street Journal just a
couple of days ago, called, ``Help! My Political Beliefs Were
Altered by a Chatbot!'' And I think the scenario you raised was
that we might basically observe people and use surveys to
figure out what they're saying, but as Sam just acknowledged,
the risk is actually worse: that the systems will directly,
maybe not even intentionally, manipulate people. And that was
the thrust of the Wall Street Journal article.
And it links to an article that I've also linked to, called
``Interacting''--and it's not yet published, not yet peer
reviewed--``Interacting with Opinionated Language Models
Changes Users' Views.'' And this comes back ultimately to data.
One of the things that I'm most concerned about with GPT-4 is
that we don't know what it's trained on. I guess Sam knows, but
the rest of us do not. And what it is trained on has
consequences for essentially the biases of the system. We could
talk about that in technical terms, but how these systems might
lead people about depends very heavily on what data is trained
on them. And so we need transparency about that, and we
probably need scientists in there doing analysis in order to
understand what the political influences, for example, of these
systems might be.
And it's not just about politics. It can be about health.
It could be about anything. These systems absorb a lot of data,
and then what they say reflects that data, and they're going to
do it differently depending on what's in that data. So, it
makes a difference if they're trained on The Wall Street
Journal as opposed to The New York Times or Reddit. I mean,
actually, they're largely trained on all of this stuff, but we
don't really understand the composition of that. And so we have
this issue of potential manipulation, and it's even more
complex than that because it's subtle manipulation. People may
not be aware of what's going on. That was the point of both The
Wall Street Journal article and the other article that I called
your attention to.
Senator Hawley. Let me ask you about AI systems trained on
personal data, the kind of data that, for instance, the social
media companies, the major platforms--Google, Meta, etc.--
collect on all of us, routinely. And we've had many a chat
about this, in this Committee, over many a year, now. But the
massive amounts of data, personal data that the companies have
on each one of us--an AI system that is trained on that
individual data, that knows each of us better than ourselves
and also knows the billions of data points about human
behavior, human language interaction, generally--wouldn't we be
able--can't we foresee an AI system that is extraordinarily
good at determining what will grab human attention and what
will keep an individual's attention?
And for the war for attention, the war for clicks, that is
currently going on, on all of these platforms--it's how they
make their money--I'm just imagining an AI system, these AI
models supercharging that war for attention such that we now
have technology that will allow individual targeting of a kind
we have never even imagined before, where the AI will know
exactly what Sam Altman finds attention grabbing, will know
exactly what Josh Hawley finds attention grabbing, will be able
to grab our attention and then elicit responses from us in a
way that we have heretofore not even been able to imagine.
Should we be concerned about that, for its corporate
applications, for the monetary applications, for the
manipulation that could come from that? Mr. Altman?
Mr. Altman. Yes, we should be concerned about that. To be
clear, OpenAI does not--you know, we don't have an ad-based
business model, so we're not trying to build up these profiles
of our users. We're not trying to get them to use it more.
Actually, we'd love it if they'd use it less, because we don't
have enough GPUs. But I think other companies are already--and
certainly will, in the future, use AI models to create, you
know, very good ad predictions of what a user will like. I
think that's already happening, in many ways.
Senator Hawley. Okay. Mr. Marcus, anything you want to add,
or Professor Marcus?
Professor Marcus. Yes, and perhaps Ms. Montgomery will want
to, as well, I don't know, but hypertargeting of advertising is
definitely going to come. I agree that that's not been OpenAI's
business model. Of course, now they're working for Microsoft,
and I don't know what's in Microsoft's thoughts, but we will
definitely see it. Maybe it will be with open-source language
models. I don't know. But the technology is, let's say, partway
there to being able to do that and will certainly get there.
Ms. Montgomery. So, we're an enterprise technology company,
not consumer focused, so the space isn't one that we
necessarily operate in, in terms of--but these issues are
hugely important issues, and it's why we've been out ahead in
developing the technology that will help to ensure that you can
do things like produce a fact sheet that has the ingredients of
what your data is trained on--data sheets, model cards, all
those types of things--and calling for, as I've mentioned
today, transparency, so you know what the algorithm was trained
on, and then you also know and can manage and monitor
continuously over the life cycle of an AI model the behavior
and the performance of that model.
Chair Blumenthal. Senator Durbin.
Chair Durbin. Thank you. I think what's happening today in
this hearing room is historic. I can't recall when we've had
people representing large corporations or private sector
entities come before us and plead with us to regulate them. In
fact, many people in the Senate have based their careers on the
opposite, that the economy will thrive if Government gets the
hell out of the way. And what I'm hearing instead today is that
``stop me before I innovate again'' message. And I'm just
curious as to how we're going to achieve this.
As I mentioned Section 230 in my opening remarks--we
learned something there. We decided that under Section 230 that
we were basically going to absolve the industry from liability
for a period of time as it came into being. Well, Mr. Altman,
on a podcast earlier this year, you agreed with host Kara
Swisher that Section 230 doesn't apply to generative AI and
that developers like OpenAI should not be entitled to full
immunity for harms caused by their products. So, what have we
learned from 230 that applies to your situation with AI?
Mr. Altman. Thank you for the question, Senator. I don't
know yet exactly what the right answer here is. I'd love to
collaborate with you to figure it out. I do think, for a very
new technology, we need a new framework. Certainly, companies
like ours bear a lot of responsibility for the tools that we
put out in the world, but tool users do, as well, and also
people that will build on top of it, between them and the end
consumer. And how we want to come up with a liability framework
there is a super important question, and we'd love to work
together.
Chair Durbin. The point I want to make is this, when it
came to online platforms, the inclination of the Government
was, ``Get out of the way. This is a new industry. Don't
overregulate it. In fact, give them some breathing space and
see what happens.'' I'm not sure I'm happy with the outcome, as
I look at online platforms----
Mr. Altman. Me, either.
Chair Durbin [continuing]. And the harms that they've
created, problems that we've seen demonstrated in this
Committee: child exploitation, cyberbullying, online drug
sales, and more. I don't want to repeat that mistake again. And
what I hear is the opposite suggestion from the private sector,
and that is, ``Come in on the front end of this thing and
establish some liability standards, precision regulation.'' For
a major company like IBM to come before this Committee and say
to the Government, ``Please regulate us''--can you explain the
difference in thinking from the past and now?
Ms. Montgomery. Yes, absolutely. So, for us, this comes
back to the issue of trust and trust in the technology. Trust
is our license to operate, as I mentioned in my remarks. And so
we firmly believe--and we've been calling for precision
regulation of artificial intelligence for years now. This is
not a new position. We think that technology needs to be
deployed in a responsible and clear way, that people--we've
taken principles around that, trust and transparency, we call
them, are principles that were articulated years ago, and build
them into practices. That's why we're here advocating for
precision regulatory approach. So, we think that AI should be
regulated at the point of risk, essentially, and that's the
point at which technology meets society.
Chair Durbin. Let's take a look at what that might appear
to be. Members of Congress are a pretty smart lot of people.
Maybe not as smart as we think we are, many times. And
Government certainly has the capacity to do amazing things. But
when you talk about our ability to respond to the current
challenge and perceived challenge of the future, challenges
which you all have described in terms which are hard to
forget--as you said, Mr. Altman, things can go quite wrong. As
you said, Mr. Marcus, democracy is threatened. I mean, the
magnitude of the challenge you're giving us is substantial. I'm
not sure that we respond quickly and with enough expertise to
deal with it.
Professor Marcus, you made a reference to CERN, the
international arbiter of nuclear research, I suppose. I don't
know if that's a fair characterization, but it's a
characterization I'll start with. What is it? What agency of
this Government do you think exists that could respond to the
challenge that you've laid down today?
Professor Marcus. We have many agencies that can respond in
some ways, for example, the FTC, the FCC. There are many
agencies that can. But my view is that we probably need a
Cabinet-level organization within the United States in order to
address this. And my reasoning for that is that the number of
risks is large. The amount of information to keep up on is so
much. I think we need a lot of technical expertise. I think we
need a lot of coordination of these efforts.
So, there is one model here where we stick to only existing
law and try to shape all of what we need to do, and each agency
does their own thing. But I think that AI is going to be such a
large part of our future and is so complicated and moving so
fast--and this does not fully solve your problem about a
dynamic world, but it's a step in that direction to have an
agency that's full-time job is to do this. I personally have
suggested, in fact, that we should want to do this in a global
way. I wrote an article in The Economist, I have a link in
here, an invited essay for The Economist, suggesting we might
want an international agency for AI.
Chair Durbin. Well, that's what I wanted to go to next, and
that is the fact that--I'll get it aside from the CERN and
nuclear examples, because Government was involved in that from
day one, at least in the United States. But now we're dealing
with innovation which doesn't necessarily have a boundary.
Professor Marcus. That's correct.
Chair Durbin. We may create a great U.S. agency, and I hope
that we do, that may have jurisdiction over U.S. corporations
and U.S. activity but doesn't have a thing to do with what's
going to bombard us from outside the United States. How do you
give this international authority the authority to regulate in
a fair way for all entities involved in AI?
Professor Marcus. I think that's probably over my pay
grade. I would like to see it happen, and I think it may be
inevitable that we push there. I mean, I think the politics
behind it are obviously complicated. I'm really heartened by
the degree to which this room is bipartisan and supporting the
same things, and that makes me feel like it might be possible.
I would like to see the United States take leadership in such
organization. It has to involve the whole world and not just
the U.S., to work properly. I think even from the perspective
of the companies, it would be a good thing.
So, the companies themselves do not want a situation where
you take these models, which are expensive to train, and you
have to have 190, some of them, you know, one for every
country. That wouldn't be a good way of operating. When you
think about the energy costs, alone, just for training these
systems, it would not be a good model if every country has its
own policies and, for each jurisdiction, every company has to
train another model and maybe--you know, different States are
different, so Missouri and California have different rules. And
so then that requires even more training of these expensive
models, with huge climate impact.
And, I mean, it would be very difficult for the companies
to operate if there was no global coordination. And so I think
that we might get the companies on board if there's bipartisan
support here, and I think there's support around the world,
that it is entirely possible that we could develop such a
thing. But obviously there are many, you know, nuances here of
diplomacy that are over my pay grade. I would love to learn
from you all to try to help make that happen.
Chair Durbin. Mr. Altman----
Mr. Altman. Can I weigh in just briefly?
Chair Durbin. Briefly, please.
Mr. Altman. I want to echo support for what Mr. Marcus
said. I think the U.S. should lead here and do things first,
but to be effective, we do need something global. As you
mentioned, this can happen everywhere. There is precedent. I
know it sounds naive to call for something like this, and it
sounds really hard.
There is precedent. We've done it before with the IAEA.
We've talked about doing it for other technologies. Given what
it takes to make these models, the chip supply chain, the sort
of limited number of competitive GPUs, the power the U.S. has
over these companies, I think there are paths to the U.S.
setting some international standards that other countries would
need to collaborate with and be part of that are actually
workable, even though it sounds on its face like an impractical
idea. And I think it would be great for the world.
Chair Durbin. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you.
Chair Blumenthal. Thanks, Senator Durbin. And, in fact, I
think we're going to hear more about what Europe is doing. The
European Parliament already is acting on an AI Act. On social
media, Europe is ahead of us. We need to be in the lead. I
think your point is very well taken. Let me turn to Senator
Graham--Senator Blackburn.
Senator Blackburn. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you
all for being here with us today. I put into my ChatGPT
account, ``Should Congress regulate AI ChatGPT?'' And it gave
me four pros, four cons, and says ultimately the decision rests
with Congress and deserves careful consideration. So, on that--
--
Chair Blumenthal. Seems reasonable.
Senator Blackburn [continuing]. You know, it was very
balanced. I recently visited with the Nashville Technology
Council--I represent Tennessee. And, of course, you had people
there from healthcare, financial services, logistics,
educational entities, and they're concerned about what they see
happening with AI, with the utilizations for their companies.
Ms. Montgomery, you know, similar to you, they've got--
healthcare people are looking at disease analytics, they are
looking at predictive diagnoses, how this can better the
outcomes for patients, logistics industry looking at ways to
save time and money and yield efficiencies. You've got
financial services that are saying, ``How does this work with
quantum? How does it work with blockchain? How can we use
this?''
But I think, as we have talked with them, Mr. Chairman, one
of the things that continues to come up is, yes, Professor
Marcus, as you were saying, the EU, different entities, are
ahead of us in this, but we have never established a federally
given preemption for online privacy, for data security, and put
some of those foundational elements in place, which is
something that we need to do as we look at this. And it will
require that Commerce Committee, Judiciary Committee decide how
we move forward so that people own their virtual you.
And, Mr. Altman, I was glad to see last week that your
OpenAI models are not going to be trained using consumer data.
I think that that is important. And if we have a second round,
I've got a host of questions for you on data security and
privacy. But I think it's important to let people control their
virtual you, their information in these settings. And I want to
come to you on music and content creation, because we've got a
lot of songwriters and artists.
And I think we have the best creative community on the face
of the earth, there in Tennessee, and they should be able to
decide if their copyrighted songs and images are going to be
used to train these models. And I'm concerned about OpenAI's
Jukebox. It offers some re-renditions in the style of Garth
Brooks, which suggests that OpenAI is trained on Garth Brooks
songs. I went in this weekend, and I said, ``Write me a song
that sounds like Garth Brooks,'' and it gave me a different
version of ``Simple Man.'' So, it's interesting that it would
do that. But you're training it on these copyrighted songs,
these MIDI files, these sound technologies.
So, as you do this, who owns the right to that AI-generated
material? And, using your technology, could I remake a song,
insert content from my favorite artist, and then own the
creative rights to that song?
Mr. Altman. Thank you, Senator. This is an area of great
interest to us. I would say, first of all, we think that
creators deserve control over how their creations are used and
what happens sort of beyond the point of them releasing it into
the world. Second, I think that we need to figure out new ways
with this new technology that creators can win, succeed, have a
vibrant life. And I'm optimistic that this will present it----
Senator Blackburn. Okay. Then let me ask you this. How do
you compensate the artist?
Mr. Altman. That's exactly what I was going to say.
Senator Blackburn. Okay.
Mr. Altman. We're working with artists now, visual artists,
musicians, to figure out what people want. There's a lot of
different opinions, unfortunately, and at some point, we'll
have----
Senator Blackburn. Okay. Let me ask you this. Do you favor
something like SoundExchange, that has worked in the area of
radio and----
Mr. Altman. I'm not familiar with SoundExchange.
Senator Blackburn [continuing]. FreePlay----
Mr. Altman. I'm sorry.
Senator Blackburn [continuing]. Streaming. Okay. You've got
your team behind you. Get back to me on that. That would be a
third-party entity.
Mr. Altman. Okay.
Senator Blackburn. So, let's discuss that. Let me move on.
Can you commit, as you've done with consumer data, not to train
ChatGPT, OpenAI Jukebox, or other AI models on artists and
songwriters' copyrighted works or use their voices and their
likenesses without first receiving their consent?
Mr. Altman. So, first of all, Jukebox is not a product we
offer. That was a research release, but it's not--you know,
unlike ChatGPT or DALLE.
Senator Blackburn. Yes, but we've lived through Napster.
Mr. Altman. Yes.
Senator Blackburn. And----
Mr. Altman. But what----
Senator Blackburn [continuing]. That was something that
really cost a lot of artists a lot of money, and----
Mr. Altman. Oh, I understand. Yes. For sure.
Senator Blackburn. In the digital distribution era. So----
Mr. Altman. I don't know the numbers on Jukebox on the top
of my head as a research release. I can follow up with your
office, but Jukebox is not something that gets much attention
or usage. It was put out to show that something's possible.
Senator Blackburn. Well, Senator Durbin just said, you
know, and I think it's a fair warning to you all, if we're not
involved in this from the get-go, and you all already are a
long way down the path on this, but if we don't step in, then
this gets away from you. So, are you working with the copyright
office? Are you considering protections for content generators
and creators in generative AI?
Mr. Altman. Yes. We are absolutely engaged on that. Again,
to reiterate my earlier point, we think that content creators,
content owners need to benefit from this technology. Exactly
what the economic model is--we're still talking to artists and
content owners about what they want. I think there's a lot of
ways this can happen. But very clearly, no matter what the law
is, the right thing to do is to make sure people get
significant upside benefit from this new technology. And we
believe that it's really going to deliver that. But the content
owners' likenesses--people totally deserve control over how
that's used and to benefit from it.
Senator Blackburn. Okay. So, on privacy, then, how do you
plan to account for the collection of voice and other user-
specific data, things that are copyrighted, user-specific data
through your AI applications? Because if I can go in and say,
``Write me a song that sounds like Garth Brooks,'' and it takes
part of an existing song, there has to be a compensation to
that artist for that utilization and that use. If it was
RadioPlay, it would be there. If it was streaming, it would be
there. So, if you're going to do that, what is your policy for
making certain you're accounting for that and you're protecting
that individual's right to privacy and their right to secure
that data and that created work?
Mr. Altman. So, a few thoughts about this. Number one, we
think that people should be able to say, ``I don't want my
personal data trained on.'' I think that's like this----
Senator Blackburn. Right. That gets to a national privacy
law, which many of us here on the dais are working toward
getting something that we can use.
Mr. Altman. Yes. I think strong privacy----
Senator Blackburn. My time's expired. Let me----
Mr. Altman. Okay.
Senator Blackburn [continuing]. Yield back. Thank you, Mr.
Chair.
Chair Blumenthal. Thanks, Senator Blackburn. Senator
Klobuchar.
Senator Klobuchar. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. And,
Senator Blackburn, I love Nashville, love Tennessee, love your
music. But I will----
Senator Blackburn. Come on down.
Senator Klobuchar [continuing]. Say I used ChatGPT and just
asked, ``What are the top creative song artists of all time?''
And two of the top three were from Minnesota. That would be
Prince and----
Senator Blackburn. I'm sure they moved to----
Senator Klobuchar [continuing]. Bob Dylan.
Senator Blackburn [continuing]. Nashville at some point.
Senator Klobuchar. Okay. All right. So, let us----
Chair Blumenthal. There is one thing----
Senator Klobuchar. Let us continue on.
Chair Blumenthal [continuing]. AI won't change, and you're
seeing it here.
[Laughter.]
Senator Klobuchar. All right. So, on a more serious note,
though, my staff and I, in my role as Chair of the Rules
Committee and leading a lot of the Election bill--and we just
introduced a bill that Representative Yvette Clarke from New
York introduced over in the House, Senators Booker and Bennet,
and I did, on political advertisements. But that is just, of
course, the tip of the iceberg. You know this from your
discussions with Senator Hawley and others about the images.
And my own view is Senator Graham's, of Section 230--is that we
just can't let people make stuff up and then not have any
consequence.
But I'm going to focus in on what my job, one of my jobs
will be on the Rules Committee, and that is election
misinformation. And we just asked ChatGPT to do a tweet about a
polling location in Bloomington, Minnesota, and said, ``There
are long lines at this polling location at Atonement Lutheran
Church. Where should we go?'' Now, albeit it's not an election
right now, but the answer, the tweet that was drafted, was a
completely fake thing: ``Go to 1234 Elm Street.''
And so you can imagine what I'm concerned about here, with
an election upon us, with the primary elections upon us, that
we're going to have all kinds of misinformation. And I just
want to know what you're planning on doing about it. I know
we're going to have to do something soon, not just for the
images of the candidates, but also for misinformation about the
actual polling places and election rules.
Mr. Altman. Thank you, Senator. We talked about this a
little bit earlier. We are quite concerned about the impact
this can have on elections. I think this is an area where
hopefully the entire industry and the Government can work
together quickly. There's many approaches, and I'll talk about
some of the things we do, but before that, I think it's
tempting to use the frame of social media, but this is not
social media. This is different. And so the response that we
need is different.
You know, this is a tool that a user is using to help
generate content more efficiently than before. They can change
it, they can test the accuracy of it. If they don't like it,
they can get another version, but it still then spreads through
social media or other ways. Like, ChatGPT is a, you know,
single-player experience where you're just using this. And so I
think, as we think about what to do, that's important to
understand.
There's a lot that we can--and do--do, there. There's
things that the model refuses to generate. We have policies. We
also, importantly, have monitoring. So, at scale, we can detect
someone generating a lot of those tweets, even if generating
one tweet is okay.
Senator Klobuchar. Yes. And of course there's going to be
other platforms, and if they're all spouting out fake election
information, I think what happened in the past with Russian
interference and the like, it's just going to be a tip of the
iceberg with some of those fake ads. So, that's number one.
Number two is the impact on intellectual property. And
Senator Blackburn was getting at some of this with song rights,
and I have serious concerns about that, but news content. So,
Senator Kennedy and I have a bill that was really quite
straightforward, that would simply--allowed the news
organizations an exemption to be able to negotiate with
basically Google and Facebook--Microsoft was supportive of the
bill--but basically negotiate with them to get better rates and
be able to have some leverage. And other countries are doing
this, Australia and the like.
And so my question is, when we already have a study by
Northwestern predicting that one-third of the U.S. newspapers
that roughly existed two decades are going to go, are going to
be gone by 2025, unless you start compensating for everything
from movies, books, yes, but also news content, we're going to
lose any realistic content producers. And so I'd like your
response to that. And of course there is an exemption for
copyright in Section 230, but I think asking little newspapers
to go out and sue all the time just can't be the answer.
They're not going to be able to keep up.
Mr. Altman. Yes. Like, it is my hope that tools like what
we're creating can help news organizations do better. I think
having a vibrant national media is critically important. And,
let's call it, round one of the internet has not been great for
that.
Senator Klobuchar. Right, but we're talking here about
local, the, you know, report on your high school football----
Mr. Altman. For sure.
Senator Klobuchar [continuing]. Scores and a scandal in
your city council, those kinds of things.
Mr. Altman. For sure.
Senator Klobuchar. They're the ones that are actually
getting the worst, the little radio stations and broadcasts.
But do you understand that this could be exponentially worse in
terms of local news content if they're not compensated?
Mr. Altman. Well----
Senator Klobuchar. Because what they need is to be
compensated for their content and not have it stolen.
Mr. Altman. Yes. Again, our model--you know, the current
version of GPT-4 ended training in 2021. It's not a good way to
find recent news, and I don't think it's a service that can do
a great job of linking out, although maybe with our plugins,
it's possible. If there are things that we can do to help local
news, we would certainly like to. Again, I think it's
critically important.
Senator Klobuchar. Okay. One last----
Professor Marcus. May I add something there?
Senator Klobuchar. Yes, but let me just ask you a question,
you can combine them quick. More transparency on the
platforms--Senator Coons and Senator Cassidy and I have the
Platform Accountability Transparency Act, to give researchers
access to this information of the algorithms and the like on
social media data. Would that be helpful? And then why don't
you just say yes or no and then go at his--the question on
newspapers.
Professor Marcus. Transparency is absolutely critical here.
To understand the political ramifications, the bias
ramifications, and so forth, we need transparency about the
data. We need to know more about how the models work. We need
to have scientists have access to them.
I was just going to amplify your earlier point about local
news. A lot of news is going to be generated by these systems.
They're not reliable. NewsGuard already has a study--I'm sorry
it's not in my appendix, but I will get it to your office--
showing that something like 50 websites are already generated
by bots.
We're going to see much, much more of that, and it's going
to make it even more competitive for the local news
organizations. And so the quality of the sort of overall news
market is going to decline as we have more generated content by
systems that aren't actually reliable in the content they've
generated.
Senator Klobuchar. Thank you. And thank you on a very
timely basis to make the argument why we have to mark up this
bill again in June. I appreciate it. Thank you.
Chair Blumenthal. Senator Graham.
Senator Graham. Thank you, Mr. Chairman and Senator Hawley,
for having this. I'm trying to find out how it is different
than social media and learn from the mistakes we made with
social media. The idea of not suing social media companies is
to allow the internet to flourish, because if I slander you,
you can sue me. If you're a billboard company and you put up
the slander, can you sue the billboard company? We said no.
Basically, Section 230 is being used by social media
companies to avoid liability for activity that other people
generate when they refuse to comply with their terms of use. A
mother calls up the company and says, ``This app is being used
to bully my child to death. You promised, in the terms of use,
you would prevent bullying.'' And she calls three times, she
gets no response, the child kills herself, and they can't sue.
Do you all agree we don't want to do that again?
Mr. Altman. Yes.
Professor Marcus. If I may speak for one second, there's a
fundamental distinction between reproducing content and
generating content.
Senator Graham. Yes, but you would like liability where
people are harmed?
Professor Marcus. Absolutely.
Ms. Montgomery. Yes. In fact, IBM has been publicly
advocating to condition liability on a reasonable care
standard.
Senator Graham. So, let me just make sure I understand the
law as it exists today. Mr. Altman, thank you for coming. Your
company is not claiming that Section 230 applies to the tool
you have created?
Mr. Altman. Yes. We're claiming we need to work together to
find a totally new approach. I don't think Section 230 is even
the right framework.
Senator Graham. Okay. So, under the law that exists today,
this tool you've created, if I'm harmed by it, can I sue you?
Mr. Altman. That is beyond my area of legal expertise.
Senator Graham. Have you ever been sued?
Mr. Altman. Not for that, no.
Senator Graham. Have you ever been sued at all, your
company?
Mr. Altman. Yes, OpenAI gets sued.
Senator Graham. Huh?
Mr. Altman. Yes, we've gotten sued before.
Senator Graham. Okay. And what for?
Mr. Altman. I mean, they've mostly been, like, pretty
frivolous things, like I think happens to any company.
Senator Graham. But, like, the examples my colleagues have
given from artificial intelligence that could literally ruin
our lives--can we go to the company that created that tool and
sue them? Is that your understanding?
Mr. Altman. Yes. I think there needs to be clear
responsibility by the companies.
Senator Graham. But you're not claiming any kind of legal
protection, like Section 230 applies to your industry. Is that
correct?
Mr. Altman. No, I don't think we're saying anything like
that.
Senator Graham. Mr. Marcus, when it comes to consumers,
there seems to be, like, three time-tested ways to protect
consumers against any product: statutory schemes, which are
nonexistent here; legal systems, which may be here, but not
social media; and agencies. Go back to Senator Hawley. The atom
bomb has put a cloud over humanity, but nuclear power could be
one of the solutions to climate change. So, what I'm trying to
do is make sure that--you just can't go build a nuclear power
plant. ``Hey, Bob, what would you like to do today?'' ``Let's
go build a nuclear power plant.'' You have a Nuclear Regulatory
Commission that governs how you build a plant and is licensed.
Do you agree, Mr. Altman, that these tools you're creating
should be licensed?
Mr. Altman. Yes. We've been calling for this. We think
any----
Senator Graham. Okay. That's the simplest way. You get a
license. And do you agree with me that the simplest way and the
most effective way is to have an agency that is more nimble and
smarter than Congress, which should be easy to create,
overlooking what you do?
Mr. Altman. Yes. We'd be enthusiastic about that.
Senator Graham. Do you agree with that, Mr. Marcus?
Professor Marcus. Absolutely.
Senator Graham. Do you agree with that, Ms. Montgomery?
Ms. Montgomery. I would have some nuances. I think we need
to build on what we have in place already today.
Senator Graham. We don't have an agency----
Ms. Montgomery. Regulators----
Senator Graham [continuing]. That's working. Wait a minute.
Nope, nope, nope.
Ms. Montgomery. We don't have an agency that regulates the
technology.
Senator Graham. So, should we have one?
Ms. Montgomery. But a lot of the issues--I don't think so.
A lot of the issues----
Senator Graham. Okay. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. So, IBM
says we don't need an agency. Interesting. Should we have a
license required for these tools?
Ms. Montgomery. So, what we believe is that we need to
regulate----
Senator Graham. That's a simple question. Should you get a
license to produce one of these tools?
Ms. Montgomery. I think it comes back to--some of them,
potentially, yes. So, what I said at the onset is that we need
to clearly----
Senator Graham. Do you believe that----
Ms. Montgomery [continuing]. Define risks.
Senator Graham. Do you claim Section 230 applies in this
area at all?
Ms. Montgomery. We're not a platform company, and we've,
again, long advocated for a reasonable care standard in Section
230.
Senator Graham. I just don't understand how you could say
that you don't need an agency to deal with the most
transformative technology maybe ever.
Ms. Montgomery. Well, I think we have existing----
Senator Graham. Is this a transformative technology that
can----
Ms. Montgomery. Yes. Absolutely.
Senator Graham [continuing]. Disrupt life as we know it,
good and bad?
Ms. Montgomery. I think it's a transformative technology,
certainly. And the conversations that we're having here today
have been really bringing to light the fact that the----
Senator Graham. You know, this----
Ms. Montgomery [continuing]. Domains and the issues----
Senator Graham. This one with you has been very
enlightening to me. Mr. Altman, why are you so willing to have
an agency?
Mr. Altman. Senator, we've been clear about what we think
the upsides are, and I think you can see from users how much
they enjoy and how much value they're getting out of it. But
we've also been clear about what the downsides are.
Senator Graham. But it's a tool.
Mr. Altman. And so that's why we think we need an agency.
Senator Graham. Right. So, it's a major tool to be used by
a lot of people, right?
Mr. Altman. It's a major new technology.
Senator Graham. Okay. If you build it----
Mr. Altman. We think it'll be----
Senator Graham. Yes. If you make a ladder and the ladder
doesn't work, you can sue the people that made the ladder. But
there are some standards out there to make a ladder. So----
Mr. Altman. That's why we're agreeing with you.
Senator Graham. Yes. That's right. I think you're on the
right track. So, here's what--my two cents' worth for the
Committee is that we need to empower an agency that issues them
a license and can take it away. Wouldn't that be some----
Mr. Altman. Yes.
Senator Graham [continuing]. Incentive to do it----
Mr. Altman. That should be----
Senator Graham [continuing]. Right, if you could actually
be taken out of business?
Mr. Altman. Clearly, that should be part of what an agency
can do.
Senator Graham. Now, and you also agree that China is doing
AI research. Is that right?
Mr. Altman. Correct.
Senator Graham. This world organization that doesn't
exist--maybe it will, but if you don't do something about the
China part of it, you'll never quite get this right. Do you
agree?
Mr. Altman. Well, that's why I think it doesn't necessarily
have to be a world organization, but there has to be some sort
of--and there's a lot of options here. There has to be some
sort of standard, some sort of set of controls----
Senator Graham. Right. Some----
Mr. Altman [continuing]. That do have global effect.
Senator Graham [continuing]. Kind of--you know, because,
you know, other people are doing this. I've got 15--military
application. How can AI change the warfare? And you've got 1
minute.
Mr. Altman. I've got 1 minute?
Senator Graham. Yes.
Mr. Altman. All right. That's a tough question for 1
minute. This is very far out of my area of expertise, but I----
Senator Graham. Well, let me give you one example: a drone.
You can plug into a drone the coordinates, and it can fly out,
and it goes over this target, and it drops a missile on this
car moving down the road, and somebody's watching it. Could AI
create a situation where a drone can select a target itself?
Mr. Altman. I think we shouldn't allow that.
Senator Graham. Well, can it be done?
Mr. Altman. Sure.
Senator Graham. Thanks.
Chair Blumenthal. Thanks, Senator Graham. Senator Coons.
Senator Coons. Thank you, Senator Blumenthal, Senator
Hawley, for convening this hearing, for working closely
together to come up with this compelling panel of witnesses and
beginning a series of hearings on this transformational
technology. We recognize the immense promise and substantial
risks associated with generative AI technologies. We know these
models can make us more efficient, help us learn new skills,
open whole new vistas of creativity.
But we also know that generative AI can authoritatively
deliver wildly incorrect information. It can hallucinate, as is
often described. It can impersonate loved ones. It can
encourage self-destructive behaviors, and it can shape public
opinion and the outcome of elections. Congress, thus far, has
demonstrably failed to responsibly enact meaningful regulation
of social media companies, with serious harms that have
resulted that we don't fully understand. Senator Klobuchar
referenced in her questioning a bipartisan bill that would open
up social media platforms' underlying algorithms. We have
struggled to even do that, to understand the underlying
technology and then to move towards responsible regulation.
We cannot afford to be as late to responsibly regulating
generative AI as we have been to social media, because the
consequences, both positive and negative, will exceed those of
social media by orders of magnitude. So, let me ask a few
questions designed to get at both how we assess the risk,
what's the role of international regulation, and how does this
impact AI?
Mr. Altman, I appreciate your testimony about the ways in
which OpenAI assesses the safety of your models through a
process of iterative deployment. The fundamental question
embedded in that process, though, is how you decide whether or
not a model is safe enough to deploy and safe enough to have
been built and then let go into the wild.
I understand one way to prevent generative AI models from
providing harmful content is to have humans identify that
content and then train the algorithm to avoid it. There's
another approach that's called constitutional AI that gives the
model a set of values or principles to guide its
decisionmaking. Would it be more effective to give models these
kinds of rules instead of trying to require or compel training
the model on all the different potentials for harmful content?
Mr. Altman. Thank you, Senator. It's a great question. I'd
like to frame it by talking about why we deploy at all: like,
why we put these systems out into the world. There's the
obvious answer about there's benefits and people are using it
for all sorts of wonderful things and getting great value, and
that makes us happy. But a big part of why we do it is that we
believe that iterative deployment and giving people and our
institutions and you all time to come to grips with this
technology, to understand it, to find its limitations and
benefits, the regulations we need around it, what it takes to
make it safe--that's really important. Going off to build a
super powerful AI system in secret and then dropping it on the
world all at once, I think would not go well.
So, a big part of our strategy is, while these systems are
still relatively weak and deeply imperfect, to find ways to get
people to have experience with them, to have contact with
reality, and to figure out what we need to do to make it safer
and better. And that is the only way that I've seen in the
history of new technology and products of this magnitude to get
to a very good outcome. And so that interaction with the world
is very important.
Now, of course, before we put something out, it needs to
meet a bar of safety. And again, we spent well over 6 months
with GPT-4, after we finished training it, going through all of
these different things and deciding also what the standards
were going to be, before we put something out there, trying to
find the harms that we knew about it and how to address those.
One of the things that's been gratifying to us is even some of
our biggest critics have looked at GPT-4 and said, ``Wow,
OpenAI made huge progress on''----
Senator Coons. If you could focus briefly on whether or not
a constitutional model that gives values would be worth it.
Mr. Altman. I was just about----
Senator Coons. I'm down to----
Mr. Altman [continuing]. To get there.
Senator Coons [continuing]. 2\1/2\ minutes.
Mr. Altman. All right. Sorry about that. Yes. I think
giving the models values up front is an extremely important
set. You know, RLHF is another way of doing that same thing.
But somehow or other, with synthetic data or human-generated
data, you're saying, ``Here are the values. Here's what I want
you to reflect,'' or ``Here are the wide bounds of everything
that society will allow, and then within there, you pick, as
the user, you know, if you want value system over here or value
system over there.''
We think that's very important. There's multiple technical
approaches, but we need to give policymakers and the world as a
whole the tools to say, ``Here's the values, and implement
them.''
Senator Coons. Thank you. Ms. Montgomery, you serve on an
AI ethics board of a long-established company that has a lot of
experience with AI. I'm really concerned that generative AI
technologies can undermine the faith of democratic values and
the institutions that we have.
The Chinese are insisting that AI, as being developed in
China, reinforce the core values of the Chinese Communist Party
and the Chinese system. And I'm concerned about how we promote
AI that reinforces and strengthens open markets, open
societies, and democracy. In your testimony, you're advocating
for AI regulation tailored to the specific way the technology
is being used, not the underlying technology itself. And the EU
is moving ahead with an AI Act which categorizes AI products
based on level of risk.
You all, in different ways, have said that you view
elections and the shaping of election outcomes and
disinformation that can influence elections as one of the
highest-risk cases, one that's entirely predictable. We have
attempted, so far unsuccessfully, to regulate social media
after the demonstrably harmful impacts of social media on our
last several elections. What advice do you have for us about
what kind of approach we should follow and whether or not the
EU direction is the right one to pursue?
Ms. Montgomery. Yes. The conception of the EU AI Act is
very consistent with this concept of precision regulation,
where you're regulating the use of the technology in context.
So, absolutely, that approach makes a ton of sense. It's what I
advocated for at the onset. Different rules for different
risks. So, in the case of elections, absolutely, any algorithm
being used in that context should be required to have
disclosure around the data being used, the performance of the
model. Anything along those lines is really important.
Guardrails need to be in place.
And on the point--just come back to the question of whether
we need an independent agency. I mean, I think we don't want to
slow down regulation to address real risks right now. Right?
So, we have existing regulatory authorities in place who have
been clear that they have the ability to regulate in their
respective domains. A lot of the issues we're talking about
today span multiple domains, elections and the like. So----
Senator Coons. If I could, I'll just assert that those
existing regulatory bodies and authorities are under resourced
and lack many of the----
Ms. Montgomery. Yes.
Senator Coons [continuing]. Statutory----
Ms. Montgomery. Absolutely.
Senator Coons [continuing]. Regulatory powers that they
need.
Ms. Montgomery. Correct.
Senator Coons. We have failed to deliver on data privacy,
even though industry has been----
Ms. Montgomery. Yes.
Senator Coons [continuing]. Asking us to regulate data
privacy. If I might, Mr. Marcus, I'm interested, also, what
international bodies are best positioned to convene
multilateral discussions to promote responsible standards?
We've talked about a model being CERN and nuclear energy. I'm
concerned about proliferation and nonproliferation. I would
suggest that the IPCC, a U.N. body, helped at least provide a
scientific baseline of what's happening in climate change, so
that even though we may disagree about strategies, globally
we've come to a common understanding of what's happening and
what should be the direction of intervention. I'd be
interested, Mr. Marcus, if you could just give us your thoughts
on who's the right body internationally to convene a
conversation and one that could also reflect our values?
Professor Marcus. I'm still feeling my way on that issue. I
think global politics is not my specialty. I'm an AI
researcher. But I have moved towards policy in recent months,
really, because of my great concern about all of these risks. I
think certainly the U.N., UNESCO, has its guidelines, should be
involved and at the table, and maybe things work under them and
maybe they don't, but they should have a strong voice and help
to develop this. The OECD has also been thinking greatly about
this. A number of organizations have, internationally. I don't
feel like I personally am qualified to say exactly what the
right model is there.
Senator Coons. Well, thank you. I think we need to pursue
this both at the national level and the international level.
I'm the Chair of the IP Subcommittee of the Judiciary
Committee. In June and July, we will be having hearings on the
impact of AI on patents and copyrights. You can already tell
from the questions of others there will be a lot of interest. I
look forward to following up with you about that topic. I know,
Mr. Chairman, I'm a little over my time.
Professor Marcus. I look forward to helping as much as
possible.
Senator Coons. Thank you very much.
Chair Blumenthal. Thanks, Senator Coons. Senator Kennedy.
Senator Kennedy. Thank you all for being here. Permit me to
share with you three hypotheses that I would like you to assume
for the moment to be true. Hypothesis number one: Many Members
of Congress do not understand artificial intelligence.
Hypothesis number two: That absence of understanding may not
prevent Congress from plunging in with enthusiasm and trying to
regulate this technology in a way that could hurt this
technology. Hypothesis number three that I would like you to
assume: There is likely a berserk wing of the artificial
intelligence community that intentionally or unintentionally
could use artificial intelligence to kill all of us and hurt us
the entire time that we are dying.
Assume all of those to be true. Please tell me, in plain
English, two or three reforms, regulations, if any, that you
would implement if you were queen or king for a day. Ms.
Montgomery?
Ms. Montgomery. I think it comes back again to transparency
and explainability in AI. We absolutely need to know and have
companies attest.
Senator Kennedy. What do you mean by transparency?
Ms. Montgomery. So, disclosure of the data that's used to
train AI, disclosure of the model and how it performs, and
making sure that there's continuous governance over these
models, that we are the leading edge in terms of----
Senator Kennedy. Governance by whom?
Ms. Montgomery [continuing]. That regulation. Technology
governance, organizational governance, rules, and clarification
that are needed that this----
Senator Kennedy. Which rules?
Ms. Montgomery [continuing]. Congress----
Senator Kennedy. I mean, this is your chance, folks, to
tell us how to get this right. Please use it.
Ms. Montgomery. All right. I mean, I think, again, the
rules should be focused on the use of AI in certain contexts.
So, if you look at, for example, the----
Senator Kennedy. Such as?
Ms. Montgomery. So, if you look at the EU AI Act, it has
certain uses of AI that it says are just simply too dangerous
and will be outlawed in----
Senator Kennedy. Okay. So----
Ms. Montgomery [continuing]. The EU.
Senator Kennedy [continuing]. We ought to first pass a law
that says you can use AI for these uses but not others. Is that
what you're saying?
Ms. Montgomery. We need to define the highest-risk uses of
AI.
Senator Kennedy. Is there anything else?
Ms. Montgomery. And then, of course, requiring things like
impact assessments and transparency, requiring companies to
show their work, protecting data that's used to train AI in the
first place, as well.
Senator Kennedy. All right. Professor Marcus, if you could
be specific. This is your shot, man. Talk in plain English and
tell me what, if any, rules we ought to implement. And please
don't just use concepts. I'm looking for specificity.
Professor Marcus. Number one, a safety review like we use
with the FDA prior to widespread deployment. If you're going to
introduce something to 100 million people, somebody has to have
their eyeballs on it.
Senator Kennedy. There you go. Okay. That's a good one.
Professor Marcus. Number----
Senator Kennedy. I'm not sure I agree with it, but that's a
good one. What else?
Professor Marcus. You didn't ask for three that you would
agree with. Number two, a nimble monitoring agency to follow
what's going on, not just prereview but also post as things are
out there in the world, with authority to call things back,
which we've discussed today. And number three would be funding
geared towards things like AI constitution, AI that can reason
about what it's doing. I would not leave things entirely to
current technology, which I think is poor at behaving in
ethical fashion and behaving in honest fashion.
And so I would have funding to try to basically focus on AI
safety research. That term has a lot of complications in my
field. There's both safety, let's say, short term and long
term. And I think we need to look at both. Rather than just
funding models to be bigger, which is the popular thing to do,
we need to fund----
Senator Kennedy. Let me cut----
Professor Marcus [continuing]. Models to be more
trustworthy.
Senator Kennedy [continuing]. You off, Professor, because I
want to hear from Mr. Altman. Mr. Altman, here's your shot.
Mr. Altman. Thank you, Senator. Number one, I would form a
new agency that licenses any effort above a certain scale of
capabilities and can take that license away and ensure
compliance with safety standards. Number two, I would create a
set of safety standards focused on what you said in your third
hypothesis, as the dangerous capability evaluations. One
example that we've used in the past is looking to see if a
model can self-replicate and self-exfiltrate into the wild. We
can give your office a long other list of the things that we
think are important there, but specific tests that a model has
to pass before it can be deployed into the world. And then,
third, I would require independent audits, so not just from the
company or the agency, but experts who can say the model is or
isn't in compliance with these stated safety thresholds and
these percentages of performance on question X or Y.
Senator Kennedy. Can you send me that information?
Mr. Altman. We will do that.
Senator Kennedy. Would you be qualified, if we promulgated
those rules, to administer those rules?
Mr. Altman. I love my current job.
[Laughter.]
Senator Kennedy. Are there people out there that would be
qualified?
Mr. Altman. We'd be happy to send you recommendations for
people out there, yes.
Senator Kennedy. Okay. You make a lot of money, do you?
Mr. Altman. No. I'm paid enough for health insurance. I
have no equity in OpenAI.
Senator Kennedy. Really?
Mr. Altman. Yes.
Senator Kennedy. That's interesting. You need a lawyer.
Mr. Altman. I need a what?
Senator Kennedy. You need a lawyer or an agent.
Mr. Altman. I'm doing this because I love it.
Senator Kennedy. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Chair Blumenthal. Thanks, Senator Kennedy. Senator Hirono.
Senator Hirono. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Listening to all
of you testifying--thank you very much for being here. Clearly,
AI truly is a game-changing tool, and we need to get the
regulation of this tool right, because my staff, for example,
asked AI--it might have been GPT-4; it might've been, I don't
know, one of the other entities--to create a song that my
favorite band, BTS--a song that they would sing somebody else's
song, but neither of the artists were involved in creating what
sounded like a really genuine song. So, you can do a lot.
We also asked: Can there be a speech created talking about
the Supreme Court decision in Dobbs and the chaos that it
created, using my voice, my kind of voice? And it created a
speech that was really good. It almost made me think about,
what do I need my staff for? So, don't worry. That's not where
we are.
Mr. Altman. Nervous laughter behind you.
Senator Hirono. Their jobs are safe. But there's so much
that can be done, and one of the things that you mentioned, Mr.
Altman, that intrigued me was you said GPT-4 can refuse harmful
requests. So, you must have put some thought into how your
system, if I can call it that, can refuse harmful requests.
What do you consider a harmful request? You can just keep it
short.
Mr. Altman. Yes. I'll give a few examples. One would be
about violent content. Another would be about content that's
encouraging self-harm. Another is adult content. Not that we
think adult content is inherently harmful, but there's things
that could be associated with that that we cannot reliably
enough differentiate, so we refuse all of it.
Senator Hirono. So, those are some of the more obvious
harmful kinds of information. But in the election context, for
example, I saw a picture of former President Trump being
arrested by NYPD, and that went viral. I don't know. Is that
considered harmful? I've seen all kinds of statements
attributed to any one of us that could be put out there that
may not rise to your level of harmful content, but there you
have it.
So, two of you said that we should have a licensing scheme.
I can't envision or imagine right now what kind of a licensing
scheme we would be able to create to pretty much regulate the
vastness of this game-changing tool. So are you thinking of an
FTC kind of a system, an FCC kind of a system? What do the two
of you even envision as a potential licensing scheme that would
provide the kind of guardrails that we need, to protect,
literally, our country from harmful content?
Mr. Altman. To touch on the first part of what you said,
there are things besides, you know, ``Should this content be
generated or not?'' that I think are also important. So, that
image that you mentioned was generated--I think it'd be a great
policy to say generated images need to be made clear in all
contexts that they were generated. And, you know, then we still
have the image out there, but we're at least requiring people
to say this was a generated image.
Senator Hirono. Okay. Well, you don't need an entire
licensing scheme in order to make that a reality.
Mr. Altman. Where I think the licensing scheme comes in is
not for what these models are capable of today, because, as you
pointed out, you don't need a new licensing agency to do that.
But as we head--and, you know, this may take a long time. I'm
not sure. As we head towards artificial general intelligence
and the impact that will have and the power of that technology,
I think we need to treat that as seriously as we treat other
very powerful technologies. And that's why I personally think
we need such a scheme.
Senator Hirono. I agree. And that is why the--by the time
we're talking about AGI, we're talking about major harms that
can occur through the use of AGI. So, Professor Marcus, I mean,
what kind of a regulatory scheme would you envision? And we
can't just come up with something, you know, that is going to
take care of the issues that will arise in the future,
especially with AGI. So what kind of a scheme would you
contemplate?
Professor Marcus. Well, first, if I can rewind just a
moment, I think you really put your finger on the central
scientific issue in terms of the challenges in building
artificial intelligence. We don't know how to build a system
that understands harm in the full breadth of its meaning. So,
what we do right now is we gather examples and we say, ``Is
this like the examples that we have labeled before?'' But
that's not broad enough. And so I thought your questioning
beautifully outlined the challenge that AI itself has to face
in order to really deal with this. We want AI itself to
understand harm, and that may require new technology, so I
think that's very important.
On the second part of your question, the model that I tend
to gravitate towards--but I am not an expert here--is the FDA,
at least as part of it, in terms of, you have to make a safety
case and say why the benefits outweigh the harms, in order to
get that license. Probably we need elements of multiple
agencies. I'm not an expert there, but I think that the safety
case part of it is incredibly important. You have to be able to
have external reviewers that are scientifically qualified look
at this and say, ``Have you addressed enough?''
So, I'll just give one specific example. Auto-GPT frightens
me. That's not something that OpenAI made, but something that
OpenAI did make called ChatGPT plugins led a few weeks later to
someone building open-source software called Auto-GPT. And what
Auto-GPT does is it allows systems to access source code,
access the internet, and so forth. And there are a lot of
potential, let's say, cybersecurity risks there. There should
be an external agency that says, ``Well, we need to be
reassured, if you're going to release this product, that there
aren't going to be cybersecurity problems or there are ways of
addressing it.''
Senator Hirono. So, Professor, I am running out of time.
You know, I just want to mention, Ms. Montgomery, your model is
a use model similar to what the EU has come up with, but the
vastness of AI and the complexities involved, I think, would
require more than looking at the use of it. I think that, based
on what I'm hearing today, don't you think that we're probably
going to need to do a heck of a lot more than to focus on what
use AI is being used for?
For example, you can ask AI to come up with a funny joke or
something, but you can use the same--you can ask the same AI
tool to generate something that is like an election fraud kind
of a situation. So, I don't know how you will make a
determination, based on where you're going with the use model,
how to distinguish those kinds of uses of this tool. So, I
think that if we're going to go toward a licensing kind of a
scheme, we're going to need to put a lot of thought into how
we're going to come up with an appropriate scheme that is going
to provide the kind of future reference that we need to put in
place.
So, I thank all of you for coming in and providing further
food for thought. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Chair Blumenthal. Thanks very much, Senator Hirono. Senator
Padilla.
Senator Padilla. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I appreciate the
flexibility as I've been back and forth between this Committee
and Homeland Security Committee, where there's a hearing going
on right now on the use of AI in government. So, it's AI day on
The Hill, or at least in the Senate, apparently.
Now, for folks watching at home, if you never thought about
AI until the recent emergence of generative AI tools, the
developments in this space may feel like they've just happened
all of a sudden. But the fact of the matter is, Mr. Chair, is
that they haven't. AI is not new, not for government, not for
business, not for the public. In fact, the public uses AI all
the time.
And just for folks to be able to relate, I want to offer
the example of anybody with a smartphone. Many features on your
device leverage AI, including suggested replies, right, when
we're text messaging or even to email, autocorrect features,
including but not limited to spelling in our email and text
applications. So, I'm frankly excited to explore how we can
facilitate positive AI innovation that benefits society while
addressing some of the already known harms and biases that stem
from the development and use of the tools today.
Now, with language models becoming increasingly ubiquitous,
I want to make sure that there's a focus on ensuring equitable
treatment of diverse demographic groups. My understanding's
that most research into evaluating and mitigating fairness
harms has been concentrated on the English language, while non-
English languages have received comparatively little attention
or investment. And that we've seen this problem before, and
I'll tell you why I raise this.
Social media companies, for example, have not adequately
invested in content moderation tools and resources for their
non-English--in non-English language. And I share this not just
out of concern for non-U.S.-based users, but so many U.S.-based
users prefer a language other than English in their
communication. So, I'm deeply concerned about repeating social
media's failure in AI tools and applications.
Question: Mr. Altman and Ms. Montgomery, how are OpenAI,
IBM ensuring language and cultural inclusivity, that they're in
their large language models and it's even an area of focus in
the development of your products?
Ms. Montgomery. So, bias and equity in technology is a
focus of ours and always has been, diversity in terms of the
development of the tools, in terms of their deployment, so
having diverse people that are actually training those tools,
considering the downstream effects, as well. We're also very
cautious, very aware of the fact that we can't just be
articulating and calling for these types of things without
having the tools and the technology to test for bias and to
apply governance across the lifecycle of AI. So, we were one of
the first teams and companies to put toolkits on the market,
deploy them, contribute them to open source, that will do
things like help to address--you know, be the technical aspects
in which we help to address issues like bias.
Senator Padilla. Can you speak just for a second
specifically to language inclusivity?
Ms. Montgomery. Yes. So, we don't have a consumer platform,
but we are very actively involved with ensuring that the
technology we help to deploy and the large language models that
we use in helping our clients to deploy technology is focused
on and available in many languages.
Senator Padilla. Thank you. Mr. Altman?
Mr. Altman. We think this is really important. One example
is that we worked with the government of Iceland, which is a
language with fewer speakers than many of the languages that
are well represented on the internet, to ensure that their
language was included in our model. And we've had many similar
conversations, and I look forward to many similar partnerships
with lower resource languages to get them into our models. GPT-
4 is unlike previous models of ours, which were good at English
and not very good at other languages--now pretty good at a
large number of languages. You can go pretty far down the list,
ranked by number of speakers, and still get good performance.
But for these very small languages, we're excited about
custom partnerships to include that language into our model
run. And the part of the question you asked about values and
making sure that cultures are included, we're equally focused
on that, excited to work with people who have particular data
sets and to work to collect a representative set of values from
around the world, to draw these wide bounds of what the system
can do.
I also appreciate what you said about the benefits of these
systems and wanting to make sure we get those to as wide of a
group as possible. I think these systems will have lots of
positive impact on a lot of people, but in particular,
historically underrepresented groups in technology, people who
have not had as much access to technology around the world.
This technology seems like it can be a big lift up.
Senator Padilla. Very good. And I know my question was
specific to language inclusivity, but I'm glad there's
agreement on the broader commitment to diversity and inclusion.
And I'll just give a couple more reasons why I think it's so
critical. You know, the largest actors in this space can afford
the massive amount of data, the computing power, and they have
the financial resources necessary to develop complex AI
systems. But in this space, we haven't seen, from a workforce
standpoint, the racial and gender diversity reflective of the
United States of America. And we risk, if we're not thoughtful
about it, contributing to the development of tools and
approaches that only exacerbate the bias and inequities that
exist in our society. So, a lot of follow-up work to do there.
In my time remaining, I do want to ask one more question.
This Committee and the public are right to pay attention to the
emergence of generative AI. Now, this technology has a
different opportunity and risk profile than other AI tools. And
these applications have felt very tangible for the public, due
to the nature of the user interface and the outputs that they
produce. But I don't think we should lose sight of the broader
AI ecosystem as we consider AI's broader impact on society, as
well as the design of appropriate safeguards.
So, Ms. Montgomery, in your testimony, as you noted, AI is
not you. Can you highlight some of the different applications
that the public and policymakers should also keep in mind as we
consider possible regulations?
Ms. Montgomery. Yes. I mean, I think the generative AI
systems that are available today are creating new issues that
need to be studied, new issues around the potential to generate
content that could be extremely misleading, deceptive, and the
like. So, those issues absolutely need to be studied. But we
shouldn't also ignore the fact that AI is a tool. It's been
around for a long time. It has capabilities beyond just
generative capabilities. And again, that's why I think going
back to this approach where we're regulating AI where it's
touching people and society is a really important way to
address it.
Senator Padilla. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Chair Blumenthal. Thanks, Senator Padilla. Senator Booker
is next, but I think he's going to defer to Senator Ossoff.
Senator Booker. That's because Senator Ossoff's a very big
deal. I don't know if you know that.
Senator Ossoff. I have a meeting at noon, and I'm grateful
to you, Senator Booker, for yielding your time. You are, as
always, brilliant and handsome. And thank you to the panelists
for joining us. Thank you to the Subcommittee leadership for
opening this up to all Committee Members.
If we're going to contemplate a regulatory framework, we're
going to have to define what it is that we're regulating. So,
you know, Mr. Altman, any such law will have to include a
section that defines the scope of regulated activities,
technologies, tools, products. Just take a stab at it.
Mr. Altman. Yes. Thanks for asking, Senator Ossoff. I think
it's super important. I think there are very different levels
here, and I think it's important that any new approach, any new
law does not stop the innovation from happening with smaller
companies, open-source models, researchers that are doing work
at a smaller scale. That's a wonderful part of this ecosystem
and of America, we don't want to slow that down. There still
may need to be some rules there, but I think we could draw a
line at systems that need to be licensed in a very intense way.
The easiest way to do it--I'm not sure if it's the best,
but the easiest would be to talk about the amount of compute
that goes into such a model. So, you know, we could define a
threshold of compute--and it'll have to change. It could go up
or down; down, as we discover more efficient algorithms, that
says, ``Above this amount of compute, you are in this regime.''
What I would prefer--it's harder to do, but I think more
accurate--is to define some capability thresholds and say, ``A
model that can do things X, Y, and ''Z--up to you all to
decide--``that's now in this licensing regime.'' But models
that are less capable--you know, we don't want to stop our
open-source community, we don't want to stop individual
researchers, we don't want to stop new startups--can proceed,
you know, with a different framework.
Senator Ossoff. Thank you. As concisely as you can, please
state which capabilities you'd propose we consider for the
purposes of this definition.
Mr. Altman. I would love, rather than to do that off the
cuff, to follow up with your office with, like, a thoughtful--
--
Senator Ossoff. Well, perhaps opine, understanding that
you're just responding. You're not making law.
Mr. Altman. All right. In the spirit of just opining, I
think a model that can persuade, manipulate, influence a
person's behavior or a person's beliefs--that would be a good
threshold. I think a model that could help create novel
biological agents would be a great threshold. Things like that.
Senator Ossoff. I want to talk about the predictive
capabilities of the technology, and we're going to have to
think about a lot of very complicated constitutional questions
that arise from it. With massive data sets, the integrity and
accuracy with which such technology can predict future human
behavior is potentially pretty significant at the individual
level, correct?
Mr. Altman. I think we don't know the answer to that for
sure, but let's say it can at least have some impact there.
Senator Ossoff. Okay. So, we may be confronted by
situations where, for example, a law enforcement agency
deploying such technology seeks some kind of judicial consent
to execute a search or to take some other police action on the
basis of a modeled prediction about some individual's behavior.
But that's very different from the kind of evidentiary
predicate that normally police would take to a judge in order
to get a warrant. Talk me through how you're thinking about
that issue.
Mr. Altman. Yes. I think it's very important that we
continue to understand that these are tools that humans use to
make human judgments and that we don't take away human
judgment. I don't think that people should be prosecuted based
off of the output of an AI system, for example.
Senator Ossoff. We have no national privacy law. Europe has
rolled one out, to mixed reviews. Do you think we need one?
Mr. Altman. I think it'd be good.
Senator Ossoff. And what would be the qualities or purposes
of such a law that you think would make the most sense, based
on your experience?
Mr. Altman. Again, this is very far out of my area of
expertise. I think there's many, many people that are privacy
experts that could weigh in on what a law needs much better
than I can.
Senator Ossoff. I'd still like you to weigh in.
Mr. Altman. I mean, I think a minimum is that users should
be able to sort of opt out from having their data used by
companies like ours or the social media companies. It should be
easy to delete your data. I think those are--but the thing that
I think is important, from my perspective running an AI
company, is that if you don't want your data used for training
these systems, you have the right to do that.
Senator Ossoff. So, let's think about how that would be
practically implemented. I mean, as I understand it, your tool,
and certainly similar tools, one of the inputs will be
scraping, for lack of a better word, data off of the open web,
right, as a low-cost way of gathering information. And there's
a vast amount of information out there about all of us. How
would such a restriction on the access or use or analysis of
such data be practically implemented?
Mr. Altman. So, I was speaking about something a little bit
different, which is the data that someone generates, the
questions they ask our system, things that they input there,
training on that. Data that's on the public web, that's
accessible--even if we don't train on that, the models can
certainly link out to it. So, that was not what I was referring
to. I think that, you know, there's ways to have your data or
there should be more ways to have your data taken down from the
public web, but certainly models with web-browsing capabilities
will be able to search the web and link out to it.
Senator Ossoff. When you think about implementing a safety
or a regulatory regime to constrain such software and to
mitigate some risk, is your view that the Federal Government
would make laws such that certain capabilities or
functionalities themselves are forbidden in potential? In other
words, one cannot deploy or execute code capable of X?
Mr. Altman. Yes.
Senator Ossoff. Or is it the act itself, X only when
actually executed, that----
Mr. Altman. Well, I think both.
Senator Ossoff [continuing]. Is illegal?
Mr. Altman. I'm a believer in defense in depth. I think
that there should be limits on what a deployed model is capable
of and then what it actually does, too.
Senator Ossoff. How are you thinking about how kids use
your product?
Mr. Altman. Well, you have to be--I mean, you have to be 18
or up, or have your parent's permission at 13 and up, to use a
product. But we understand that people get around those
safeguards all the time. And so what we try to do is just
design a safe product.
And there are decisions that we make that we would allow if
we knew only adults were using it, that we just don't allow in
the product because we know children will use it some way or
other, too. In particular, given how much these systems are
being used in education, we, like, want to be aware that that's
happening.
Senator Ossoff. I think what--and Senator Blumenthal has
done extensive work investigating this. What we've seen
repeatedly is that companies whose revenues depend upon volume
of use, screen time, intensity of use, design these systems in
order to maximize the engagement of all users, including
children, with perverse results in many cases. And what I would
humbly advise you is that you get way ahead of this issue, the
safety for children of your product, or I think you're going to
find that Senator Blumenthal, Senator Hawley, others on the
Subcommittee, and I will look very harshly on the deployment of
technology that harms children.
Mr. Altman. We couldn't agree more. I think we're out of
time, but I'm happy to talk about that if I can respond.
Senator Ossoff. Go ahead. Well, that's up to the Chairman.
Chair Blumenthal. Go ahead.
Mr. Altman. Okay. First of all, I think we try to design
systems that do not maximize for engagement. In fact, we're so
short on GPUs, the less people use our products, the better.
But we're not an advertising-based model. We're not trying to
get people to use it more and more. And I think that's a
different shape than ad-supported social media.
Second, these systems do have the capability to influence
in obvious and in very nuanced ways, and I think that's
particularly important for the safety of children, but that
will impact all of us. One of the things that we'll do
ourselves, regulation or not, but I think a regulatory approach
would be good for, also, is requirements about how the values
of these systems are set and how these systems respond to
questions that can cause influence. So, we'd love to partner
with you. Couldn't agree more on the importance.
Senator Ossoff. Thank you.
Senator Booker. Mr. Chairman, for the record, I just want
to say that the Senator from Georgia is also very handsome and
brilliant, too.
[Laughter.]
Senator Booker. But----
Chair Blumenthal. I will allow that comment to stand
without objection.
Senator Booker. Without objection. Okay. Mr. Chairman and
Ranking Member, it's been----
Chair Blumenthal. Senator Booker, you are now recognized.
Senator Booker. Thank you very much. Thank you. It's nice
that we finally got down to the bald guys down here at the end.
I just want to thank you both. This has been one of the best
hearings I've had this Congress and just a testimony to you
two, and seeing the challenges and the opportunities that AI
presents. So, I appreciate you both.
I want to just jump in, I think, very broadly, and then
I'll get a little more narrow. Sam, you said very broadly,
technology has been moving like this, and a lot of people have
been talking about regulation. And so I use the example of the
automobile. What an extraordinary piece of technology. I mean,
New York City did not know what to do with horse manure. They
were having crises, forming commissions, and the automobile
comes along, ends that problem. But at the same time, we have
tens of thousands of people dying on highways every day. We
have emissions crises and the like.
There are multiple Federal agencies, multiple Federal
agencies that were created or are specifically focused on
regulating cars. And so this idea that this equally
transforming technology is coming, and for Congress to do
nothing--which is not what anybody here is calling for, little
or nothing--is obviously unacceptable. I really appreciate--
Senator Welch and I, who've been going back and forth during
this hearing, and him and Bennet have a bill talking about
trying to regulate in this space. Not doing so for social media
has been, I think, very destructive and allowed a lot of things
to go on that are really causing a lot of harm.
And so the question is, what kind of regulation? You all
have spoken of that to a lot of my colleagues. And I want to--
Ms. Montgomery--and I have to give full disclosure, I'm the
child of two IBM parents. But, you know, you talked about
defining the highest-risk uses. We don't know all of them. We
really don't. We can't see where this is going, regulating at
the point of risk.
And you sort of called not for an agency--and I think when
somebody else asks you to specify--because you don't want to
slow things down; we should build on what we have in place. But
you can envision that we can try to work on two different ways
that ultimately a specific--like we have in cars: EPA, NHTSA,
the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, all of these
things. You can imagine something specific that is, as Mr.
Marcus points out, a nimble agency that could do monitoring and
other things. You can imagine the need for something like that,
correct?
Ms. Montgomery. Oh, absolutely. Yes.
Senator Booker. And so, just for the record, then, in
addition to trying to regulate with what we have now, you would
encourage Congress and my colleague, Senator Welch, to move
forward in trying to figure out the right tailored agency to
deal with what we know and perhaps things that might come up in
the future?
Ms. Montgomery. I would encourage Congress to make sure it
understands the technology, has the skills and resources in
place to impose regulatory requirements on the uses of the
technology, and to understand emerging risks as well. So, yes.
Senator Booker. Yes. Mr. Marcus, there's no way to put this
genie in the bottle. Globally, it's exploding. I appreciate
your thoughts, and I shared some with my staff about your ideas
of what the international context is. But there's no way to
stop this moving forward. So, with that understanding, just
building on what Ms. Montgomery said, what kind of
encouragement do you have--as specifically as possible--to
forming an agency, to using current rules and regulations? Can
you just put some clarity on what you've already stated?
Professor Marcus. Let me just insert, there are more genies
yet to come, from more bottles. Some genies are already out,
but we don't have machines that can really, for example, self-
improve themselves. We don't really have machines that have
self-awareness, and we might not ever want to go there. So,
there are other genies to be concerned about.
On to the main part of your question. I think that we need
to have some international meetings very quickly with people
who have expertise in how you grow agencies and the history of
growing agencies. We need to do that in the Federal level. We
need to do that in the international level.
I'll just emphasize one thing I haven't as much as I would
like to, which is that I think science has to be a really
important part of it. And I'll give an example. We've talked
about misinformation. We don't really have the tools right now
to detect and label misinformation with nutrition labels that
we would like to. We have to build new technologies for that.
We don't really have tools yet to detect a wide uptick in
cybercrime, probably. We probably need new tools there. We need
science to probably help us to figure out what we need to build
and also what it is that we need to have transparency around,
and so forth.
Senator Booker. Understood. Understood. Sam, just go to you
for the little bit of time I have left. Real quick. First of
all, you're a bit of a unicorn when I sat down with you first.
Could you explain, why nonprofit? In other words, you're not
looking--and you've even capped the VC people. Just really
quickly, I want folks to understand that.
Mr. Altman. We started as a nonprofit, really focused on
how this technology was going to be built. At the time, it was
very outside the Overton Window that something like AGI was
even possible. That's shifted a lot. We didn't know at the time
how important scale was going to be, but we did know that we
wanted to build this with humanity's best interests at heart
and a belief that this technology could, if it goes the way we
want, if we can do some of those things Professor Marcus
mentioned, really deeply transform the world. And we wanted to
be as much of a force for getting to a positive----
Senator Booker. I'm going to interrupt you. I think that's
all good. I hope more of that gets out on the record--the
second part of my question, as well. I found it fascinating.
But are you ever going to--for a revenue model, for a return on
your investors, are you ever going to do ads or something like
that?
Mr. Altman. I wouldn't say never. Like, I think there may
be people that we want to offer services to, and there's no
other model that works, but I really like having a
subscription-based model. We have API developers pay us, and we
have ChatGPT consumers pay us.
Senator Booker. Okay. Can I jump to the--then can I just
jump----
Mr. Altman. Sure.
Senator Booker [continuing]. Real quickly--one of my
biggest concerns about this space is what I've already seen in
the space of Web2, Web3--is this massive corporate
concentration. It is really terrifying to see how few companies
now control and affect the lives of so many of us. And these
companies are getting bigger and more powerful. And I see, you
know, OpenAI backed by Microsoft. Anthropic is backed by
Google. Google has its own in-house products, we know Bard.
So, I'm really worried about that. And I'm wondering if,
Sam, you can give me a quick acknowledgment. Are you worried
about the corporate concentration in this space and what effect
it might have and the associated risks, perhaps, with market
concentration in AI? And then, Mr. Marcus, can you answer that,
as well?
Mr. Altman. I think there will be many people that develop
models. What's happening on the open-source community is
amazing, but there will be a relatively small number of
providers that can make models at the true leading edge----
Senator Booker. And is there danger in that?
Mr. Altman. I think there is benefits and danger to that.
Like, as we were talking about all of the dangers with AI, the
fewer of us that you really have to keep a careful eye on, on
the absolute, like, bleeding edge of capabilities, there's
benefits there, but I think there needs to be enough--and there
will, because there's so much value--that consumers have
choice, that we have different ideas.
Senator Booker. Mr. Marcus, real quick?
Professor Marcus. There is a real risk of a kind of
technocracy combined with oligarchy, where a small number of
companies influence people's beliefs through the nature of
these systems. Again, I put something in the record about The
Wall Street Journal about how these systems can subtly shape
our beliefs and has enormous influence on how we live our
lives. And having a small number of players do that with data
that we don't even know about--that scares me.
Senator Booker. Sam. I'm sorry.
Mr. Altman. One more thing I wanted to add. One thing that
I think is very important is that what these systems get
aligned to, whose values, what those bounds are, that that is
somehow set by society as a whole, by governments as a whole.
And so creating that data set, the alignment data set--it could
be an AI constitution, whatever it is--that has got to come
very broadly from society.
Senator Booker. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. My
time's expired, and I guess the best for last.
Chair Blumenthal. Thank you, Senator Booker. Senator Welch.
Senator Welch. First of all, I want to thank you, Senator
Blumenthal and you, Senator Hawley. This has been a tremendous
hearing. Senators are noted for their short attention spans,
but I sat through this entire hearing and enjoyed every minute
of it.
Chair Blumenthal. You have one of our longer attention
spans in the United States Senate.
[Laughter.]
Chair Blumenthal. To your great credit.
Senator Welch. Well, we've had good witnesses, and it's an
incredibly important issue. All the questions I have have been
asked, really, but here's kind of a takeaway and what I think
is the major question that we're going to have to answer as a
Congress. Number one, you're here because AI is this
extraordinary new technology that everyone says can be
transformative, as much as the printing press.
Number two, it's really unknown what's going to happen, but
there's a big fear you've expressed, all of you, about what bad
actors can do and will do if there's no rules of the road.
Number three, as a Member who served in the House and now in
the Senate, I've come to the conclusion that it's impossible
for Congress to keep up with the speed of technology.
And there have been concerns expressed about social media
and now about AI that relate to fundamental privacy rights,
bias rights, intellectual property, the spread of
disinformation, which in many ways for me is the biggest threat
because that goes to the core of our capacity for self-
governing. There's the economic transformation, which can be
profound. There's safety concerns.
And I've come to the conclusion that we absolutely have to
have an agency. What its scope of engagement is has to be
defined by us. But I believe that unless we have an agency that
is going to address these questions from social media and AI,
we really don't have much of a defense against the bad stuff,
and the bad stuff will come. So, last year I introduced in the
House side--and Senator Bennet didn't--since it was the end of
the year--Digital Commission Act, and we're going to be
reintroducing that this year.
And the two things that I want to ask--one, you've somewhat
answered, because I think two of the three of you have said you
think we do need an independent commission. You know, Congress
established an independent commission when railroads were
running rampant over the interest of farmers, when Wall Street
had no rules of the road and we had the SEC. I think we're at
that point now. But what the commission does would have to be
defined and circumscribed.
But also there's always a question about the use of
regulatory authority and the recognition that it can be used
for good--J.D. Vance actually mentioned that when we were
considering his and Senator Brown's bill about railroads in
that event in East Palestine, regulation for the public health.
But there's also legitimate concern about regulation getting in
the way of things, being too cumbersome, and being a negative
influence.
So, A, two of the three of you have said you think we do
need an agency. What are some of the perils of an agency that
we would have to be mindful of, in order to make certain that
its goals of protecting many of those interests I just
mentioned--privacy, bias, intellectual property,
disinformation--would be the winners and not the losers? And
I'll start with you, Mr. Altman.
Mr. Altman. Thank you, Senator. One, I think America has
got to continue to lead. This happened in America. I'm very
proud that it happened in America.
Senator Welch. By the way, I think that's right, and that's
why I'd be much more confident if we had our agency, as opposed
to--get involved in international discussions. Ultimately you
want the rules of the road, but I think if we lead and get
rules of the road that work for us, that is probably a more
effective way to proceed.
Mr. Altman. I personally believe there's a way to do both.
And I think it is important to have the global view on this,
because this technology will impact Americans and all of us
wherever it's developed. But I think we want America to lead.
We want----
Senator Welch. So, get to the perils issue, though, because
I know----
Mr. Altman. Well, that's one. I mean, that is a peril----
Senator Welch [continuing]. My Republican colleagues--
right.
Ms. Montgomery. That's right.
Mr. Altman [continuing]. Which is, you slow down American
industry in such a way that China or somebody else makes faster
progress. A second, and I think this can happen with--like, the
regulatory pressure should be on us. It should be on Google. It
should be on the other small set of people in the lead the
most.
We don't want to slow down smaller startups. We don't want
to slow down open-source efforts. We still need them to comply
with things. They can still--you can still cause great harm
with a smaller model, but leaving the room and the space for
new ideas and new companies and independent researchers to do
their work and not putting a regulatory burden that, say, a
company like us could handle but a smaller one couldn't. I
think that's another peril, and it's clearly a way that
regulation has gone.
Senator Welch. Okay. Mr. Marcus, or Professor Marcus?
Professor Marcus. The other obvious peril is regulatory
capture. If we make it appear as if we are doing something, but
it's more like greenwashing, and nothing really happens, we
just keep out the little players because we put so much burden
that only the big players can do it. So, there are also those
kinds of perils. I fully agree with everything that Mr. Altman
said, and I would add that to the list.
Senator Welch. Okay. Ms. Montgomery?
Ms. Montgomery. One of the things I would add to the list
is the risk of not holding companies accountable for the harms
that they're causing today. Right? So, we talk about
misinformation in electoral systems.
Senator Welch. So, no Section 230----
Ms. Montgomery. Agency or no agency----
Senator Welch [continuing]. Kind of flavor here.
Ms. Montgomery [continuing]. We need to hold companies
responsible today and accountable for the AI that they're
deploying that disseminates misinformation on things like
elections and where the----
Senator Welch. Yes.
Ms. Montgomery [continuing]. Risk is.
Senator Welch. You know, a regulatory agency would do a lot
of the things that Senator Graham was talking about. You know,
you don't build a nuclear reactor without getting a license.
You don't build an AI system without getting a license that
gets tested independently.
Mr. Altman. I think it's a great analogy.
Senator Welch. All right.
Professor Marcus. We need both predeployment and
postdeployment.
Senator Welch. Okay. Thank you all very much. I yield back,
Mr. Chairman.
Chair Blumenthal. Thanks. Thanks, Senator Welch. Let me ask
a few more questions. You've all been very, very patient, and
the turnout today, which is beyond our Subcommittee, I think
reflects both your value in what you're contributing as well as
the interest in this topic.
There are a number of subjects that we haven't covered at
all. One was just alluded to by Professor Marcus, which is the
monopolization danger, the dominance of markets that excludes
new competition and thereby inhibits or prevents innovation and
invention, which we have seen in social media as well as some
of the old industries: airlines, automobiles, and others, where
consolidation has narrowed competition.
And so I think we need to focus on kind of an old area of
antitrust, which dates more than a century. It's still
inadequate to deal with the challenges we have right now in our
economy, and certainly we need to be mindful of the way that
rules can enable the big guys to get bigger and exclude
innovation and competition and responsible good guys, such as
are represented in this industry right now.
We haven't dealt with national security. There are huge
implications for national security. I will tell you, as a
Member of the Armed Services Committee, classified briefings on
this issue have abounded. And the threats that are posed by
some of our adversaries--China has been mentioned here. But the
sources of threats to this Nation in this space are very real
and urgent. We're not going to deal with them today, but we do
need to deal with them, and we will, hopefully, in this
Committee.
And then on the issue of a new agency, you know, I've been
doing this stuff for a while. I was Attorney General of
Connecticut for 20 years. I was a Federal prosecutor, the U.S.
attorney. Most of my career has been in enforcement. And I will
tell you something, you can create 10 new agencies, but if you
don't give them the resources--and I'm talking not just about
dollars, I'm talking about scientific expertise--you guys will
run circles around them. And it isn't just the models or the
generative AI that will run circles around them, but it is the
scientists in your companies.
For every success story in Government regulation, you can
think of five failures. That's true of the FDA, it's true of
the IAEA, it's true of the SEC, it's true of the whole alphabet
list of Government agencies. And I hope our experience here
will be different. But the Pandora's box requires more than
just the words or the concepts, licensing, new agency. There's
some real hard decisionmaking, as Ms. Montgomery has alluded
to, about how to frame the rules to fit the risk. First, do no
harm. Make it effective, make it enforceable, make it real.
I think we need to grapple with the hard questions here
that, you know, frankly, this initial hearing, I think, has
raised very successfully but not answered. And I thank our
colleagues who have participated and made these very creative
suggestions. I'm very interested in enforcement. I, you know,
literally 15 years ago, I think, advocated abolishing Section
230. What's old is new again. You know, now people are talking
about abolishing Section 230. Back then, it was considered
completely unrealistic, but enforcement really does matter.
I want to ask Mr. Altman, because of the privacy issue--and
you've suggested that you have an interest in protecting the
privacy of the data that may come to you or be available--what
specific steps do you take to protect privacy?
Mr. Altman. One is that we don't train on any data
submitted to our API. So, if you're a business customer of ours
and submit data, we don't train on it at all. We do retain it
for 30 days, solely for the purpose of trust and safety
enforcement. But that's different than training on it. If you
use ChatGPT, you can opt out of us training on your data. You
can also delete your conversation history or your whole
account.
Chair Blumenthal. Ms. Montgomery, I know you don't deal
directly with consumers, but do you take steps to protect
privacy as well?
Ms. Montgomery. Absolutely. And we even filter our large
language models for content that includes personal information
that may have been pulled from public data sets, as well. So,
we apply additional level of filtering.
Chair Blumenthal. Professor Marcus, you made reference to
self-awareness, self-learning. Already, we're talking about the
potential for jailbreaks. How soon do you think that new kind
of generative AI will be usable, will be practical?
Professor Marcus. New AI that is self-aware and so forth,
or----
Chair Blumenthal. Yes.
Professor Marcus. I mean, I have no idea on that one. I
think we don't really understand what self-awareness is, and so
it's hard to put a date on it. In terms of self-improvement,
there's some modest self-improvement in current systems, but
one could imagine a lot more, and that could happen in 2 years,
it could happen in 20 years. There are basic paradigms that
haven't been invented yet. Some of them we might want to
discourage, but it's a bit hard to put timelines on them.
And just going back to enforcement for one second, one
thing that is absolutely paramount, I think, is far greater
transparency about what the models are and what the data are.
That doesn't necessarily mean everybody in the general public
has to know exactly what's in one of these systems, but I think
it means that there needs to be some enforcement arm that can
look at these systems, can look at the data, can perform tests,
and so forth.
Chair Blumenthal. Let me ask you, all of you: I think there
has been a reference to elections and banning outputs involving
elections. Are there other areas where you think--what are the
other high-risk or highest-risk areas where you would either
ban or establish especially strict rules? Ms. Montgomery?
Ms. Montgomery. The space around misinformation, I think,
is a hugely important one, and coming back to the points of
transparency, you know, knowing what content was generated by
AI is going to be a really critical area that we need to
address.
Chair Blumenthal. Any others?
Professor Marcus. I think medical misinformation is
something to really worry about. We have systems that
hallucinate things. They're going to hallucinate medical
advice. Some of the advice they'll give is good, some of it's
bad. We need really tight regulation around that. Same with
psychiatric advice, people using these things as kind of ersatz
therapists. I think we need to be very concerned about that.
I think we need to be concerned about internet access for
these tools, when they can start making requests both of people
and internet things. It's probably okay if they just do search,
but as they do more intrusive things on the internet, like, do
we want them to be able to order equipment or order chemistry
and so forth? So, as we empower these systems more by giving
them internet access, I think we need to be concerned about
that.
And then we've hardly talked at all about long-term risk.
Sam alluded to it briefly. I don't think that's where we are
right now, but as we start to approach machines that have a
larger footprint on the world, beyond just having a
conversation, we need to worry about that and think about how
we're going to regulate that and monitor it and so forth.
Chair Blumenthal. In a sense, we've been talking about bad
guys or certain bad actors manipulating AI to do harm.
Professor Marcus. Manipulating people.
Chair Blumenthal. And manipulating people. But also,
generative AI can manipulate the manipulators.
Professor Marcus. It can. I mean, there's many layers of
manipulation that are possible, and I think we don't yet really
understand the consequences. Dan Dennett just sent me a
manuscript last night that will be in The Atlantic in a few
days, on what he calls counterfeit people. It's a wonderful
metaphor. These systems are almost like counterfeit people, and
we don't really honestly understand what the consequence of
that is. They're not perfectly humanlike yet, but they're good
enough to fool a lot of the people a lot of the time, and that
introduces lots of problems, for example, cybercrime and how
people might try to manipulate markets and so forth. So, it's a
serious concern.
Chair Blumenthal. In my opening, I suggested three
principles: transparency, accountability, and limits on use.
Would you agree that those are a good starting point, Ms.
Montgomery?
Ms. Montgomery. One hundred percent. And as you also
mentioned, industry shouldn't wait for Congress. That's what
we're doing here at IBM.
Chair Blumenthal. There's no reason that----
Ms. Montgomery. Absolutely.
Chair Blumenthal [continuing]. Industry should wait for
Congress.
Ms. Montgomery. Yes.
Chair Blumenthal. Professor Marcus?
Professor Marcus. I think those three would be a great
start. I mean, there are things like the White House ``Bill of
Rights,'' for example, that show, I think, a large consensus.
The UNESCO guidelines and so forth show a large consensus
around what it is we need, and the real question is definitely,
now, how are we going to put some teeth in it, try to make
these things actually enforce? So, for example, we don't have
transparency yet. We all know we want it, but we're not doing
enough to enforce it.
Chair Blumenthal. Mr. Altman?
Mr. Altman. I certainly agree that those are important
points. I would add that--and Professor Marcus touched on this.
I would add that as we--we spent most of the time today on
current risks, and I think that's appropriate, and I'm very
glad we have done it. As these systems do become more capable--
and I'm not sure how far away that is, but maybe not super
far--I think it's important that we also spend time talking
about how we're going to confront those challenges.
Chair Blumenthal. Having talked to you privately, I agree--
--
Mr. Altman. You know how much I care.
Chair Blumenthal. I agree that you care, deeply and
intensely, but also that prospect of increased danger or risk
resulting from even more complex and capable AI mechanisms
certainly may be closer than a lot of people appreciate.
Professor Marcus. Let me just add, for the record, that I'm
sitting next to Sam, closer than I've ever sat to him except
once before in my life, and his sincerity in talking about
those fears is very apparent physically in a way that just
doesn't communicate on the television screen----
Mr. Altman. Thank you.
Professor Marcus [continuing]. But communicates from here.
Chair Blumenthal. Thank you. Senator Hawley.
Senator Hawley. Thank you again, Mr. Chairman, for a great
hearing. Thanks to the witnesses.
So, I've been keeping a little list here of the potential
downsides or harms, risks of generative AI, even in its current
form. Let's just run through it. Loss of jobs. And this isn't
speculative, I think your company, Ms. Montgomery, has
announced that it's potentially laying off 7,800 people, a
third of your non-consumer-facing workforce, because of AI. So,
loss of jobs; invasion of privacy, personal privacy, on a scale
we've never before seen; manipulation of personal behavior;
manipulation of personal opinions; and potentially the
degradation of free elections in America. Did I miss anything?
I mean, this is--this is quite a list.
I noticed that an eclectic group of about 1,000 technology
and AI leaders, everybody from Andrew Yang to Elon Musk,
recently called for a 6-month moratorium on any further AI
development. Were they right? Do you join those calls? Are they
right to do that? Should we pause for 6 months or----
Professor Marcus. Your characterization's not quite
correct. I actually signed that letter. About 27,000 people
signed it. It did not call for a ban on all AI research, nor on
all AI, but only on a very specific thing, which would be
systems like GPT-5. Every other piece of research that's ever
been done, it was actually supportive or neutral about. And it
specifically called for more research on trustworthy and safe
AI.
Senator Hawley. So, you think that we should take a
moratorium, a 6-month moratorium or more on anything beyond
Chat--GPT-4?
Professor Marcus. I took the letter--what is the famous
phrase--spiritually, not literally. What was the famous phrase?
Senator Hawley. Well, I'm asking for your opinion now,
though. So, would you----
Professor Marcus. My--my----
Senator Hawley. Did you endorse the 6-month moratorium?
Professor Marcus. My opinion is that the moratorium that we
should focus on is actually deployment until we have good
safety cases. I don't know that we need to pause that
particular project, but I do think its emphasis on focusing
more on AI safety, on trustworthy, reliable AI is exactly
right.
Senator Hawley. Deployment means not making it available to
the public?
Professor Marcus. Yes. So----
Senator Hawley. You'd pause that?
Professor Marcus. So, my concern is about things that are
deployed at a scale of, let's say, 100 million people without
any external review. I think that we should think very
carefully about doing that.
Senator Hawley. What about you, Mr. Altman? Do you agree
with that? Would you pause any further development for 6 months
or longer?
Mr. Altman. So, first of all, after we finished training
GPT-4, we waited more than 6 months to deploy it. We are not
currently training what will be GPT-5. We don't have plans to
do it in the next 6 months. But I think the frame of the letter
is wrong. What matters is audits, red teaming safety standards
that a model needs to pass before training. If we pause for 6
months, then I'm not really sure what we do then. Do we pause
for another six? Do we kind of come up with some rules then?
The standards that we have developed and that we've used
for GPT-4 deployment--we want to build on those, but we think
that's the right direction, not a calendar-clock pause. There
may be times--I expect there will be times when we find
something that we don't understand and we really do need to
take a pause, but we don't see that yet, never mind all the
benefits.
Senator Hawley. You don't see what yet? You're comfortable
with all of the potential ramifications from the current
existing technology----
Mr. Altman. I'm sorry.
Senator Hawley [continuing]. We've talked about today?
Mr. Altman. We don't see reasons to not train a new one.
For deploying, as I mentioned, I think there's all sorts of
risky behavior, and there's limits we put. We have to pull
things back sometimes, add new ones. I meant we don't see
something that would stop us from training the next model,
where we'd be so worried that we'd create something dangerous
even in that process, let alone the deployment.
Senator Hawley. What about----
Mr. Altman. But that may happen.
Senator Hawley. What about you, Ms. Montgomery?
Ms. Montgomery. I think we need to use the time to
prioritize ethics and responsible technology as opposed to
pausing development.
Senator Hawley. Well, wouldn't a pause in development help
the development of protocols for safety standards and ethics?
Ms. Montgomery. I'm not sure how practical it is to pause,
but we absolutely should be prioritizing safety protocols.
Senator Hawley. Okay. The point about practicality leads me
to this. I'm interested in this talk about an agency, and, you
know, maybe that would work. Although, having seen how agencies
work in this Government, they usually get captured by the
interests that they're supposed to regulate. They usually get
controlled by the people who they're supposed to be watching. I
mean, that's just been our history for 100 years. Maybe this
agency would be different.
I have a little different idea. Why don't we just let
people sue you? Why don't we just make you liable in court? We
can do that. We know how to do that. We can pass a statute. We
can create a Federal right of action that will allow private
individuals who are harmed by this technology to get into court
and to bring evidence into court.
And it can be anybody. I mean, you want to talk about
crowdsourcing, we'll just open the courthouse doors. We'll
define a broad right of action, private right of action,
private citizens to be class actions. We'll just open it up.
We'll allow people to go into court. We'll allow them to
present evidence. They say that they were harmed by--they were
given medical misinformation, they were given election
misinformation, whatever. Why not do that? Mr. Altman?
Mr. Altman. I mean, please forgive my ignorance. Can't
people sue us? It's not like----
Senator Hawley. Well, you're not protected by Section 230,
but there's not currently, I don't think, a Federal right of
action, private right of action that says that if you are
harmed by generative AI technology, we will guarantee you the
ability to get into court.
Mr. Altman. Oh. Well, I think there's, like, a lot of other
laws where if, you know, technology harms you, there's
standards that we could be sued under, unless I'm really
misunderstanding how things work. If the question is, ``Are
clearer laws about the specifics of this technology and
consumer protections a good thing?'' I would say definitely
yes.
Professor Marcus. The laws that we have today were designed
long before we had artificial intelligence, and I do not think
they give us enough coverage. The plan that you propose, I
think, as a hypothetical, would certainly make a lot of lawyers
wealthy, but I think it would be too slow to effect a lot of
the things that we care about. And there are gaps in the law.
For example, we don't really know----
Senator Hawley. Wait, you think it'd be slower than
Congress?
Professor Marcus. Yes, I do, in some ways.
Senator Hawley. Really?
Professor Marcus. Well----
Senator Hawley. Do you know----
Professor Marcus [continuing]. Litigation can take a decade
or more.
Senator Hawley. Oh, but the threat----
Professor Marcus. I think you guys----
Senator Hawley [continuing]. Of litigation is a powerful
tool. I mean, how would IBM like to be sued for----
Professor Marcus. I'm----
Senator Hawley [continuing]. $100 billion?
Professor Marcus [continuing]. In no way asking to take
litigation off the table, among the tools. But I think, for
example, if I can continue, there are areas like copyright
where we don't really have laws. We don't really have a way of
thinking about wholesale misinformation, as opposed to
individual pieces of it, where, say, a foreign actor might make
billions of pieces of misinformation, or a local actor. We have
some laws around market manipulation we could apply, but we'd
get in a lot of situations where we don't really know which
laws apply. There would be loopholes. The system is really not
thought through.
And, in fact, we don't even know that 230 does or does not
apply here, as far as I know. I think that that's something a
lot of people speculated about this afternoon, but it's not
solid.
Senator Hawley. Well, we could fix that.
Professor Marcus. Well, the question is, how?
Senator Hawley. Oh, easy. It would be easy for us to say
that Section 230 doesn't apply to generative AI. Ms.
Montgomery, I'll give you----
Professor Marcus. I think that's----
Senator Hawley [continuing]. The last word, and then I'll--
--
Professor Marcus [continuing]. An important start.
Senator Hawley [continuing]. Yield, Mr. Chairman.
Ms. Montgomery. Just on the point of----
Chair Blumenthal. You suggested, Ms. Montgomery, a duty of
care, which I think fits the idea of a private right of action.
Ms. Montgomery. Yes, that's exactly right. And also, AI is
not a shield. Right? So, if a company discriminates in granting
credit, for example, or in the hiring process, by virtue of the
fact that they relied too significantly on an AI tool, they're
responsible for that today, regardless of whether they used a
tool or a human to make that decision.
Chair Blumenthal. I'm going to turn to Senator Booker for
some final questions, but I just want to make a quick point
here on the issue of the moratorium. I think we need to be
careful. The world won't wait. The rest of the global
scientific community isn't going to pause. We have adversaries
that are moving ahead, and sticking our head in the sand is not
the answer. Safeguards and protections, yes, but a flat stop
sign, sticking our head in the sand, I would be very, very
worried about doing.
Professor Marcus. Without militating for any sort of pause,
I would just again emphasize there is a difference between
research, which surely we need to do to keep pace with our
foreign rivals, and deployment at really massive scale. You
know, you could deploy things at a scale of a million people or
10 million people, but not 100 million people or a billion
people. And if there are risks, you might find them out sooner
and be able to close the barn doors before the horses leave
rather than after.
Chair Blumenthal. Senator Booker.
Senator Booker. Yes. There will be no pause. I mean,
there's no enforcement body to force a--it's just not going to
happen. It's nice to call for it, for any just reasons or
whatsoever, but forgive me for sounding skeptical. Nobody's
pausing. This thing is----
Professor Marcus. I would agree.
Senator Booker. You----
Professor Marcus. I would agree. And I don't think it's a
realistic thing in the world. The reason I personally signed
the letter was to call attention to how serious the problems
were and to emphasize spending more of our efforts on
trustworthy and safe AI rather than just making a bigger
version of something we already know to be unreliable.
Senator Booker. Yes. So, I'm a futurist. I love excitement
of the future, and I guess there's a famous question, ``If you
couldn't control for your race, your gender, where you would
land on the planet Earth, at what time in humanity would you
want to be born?'' Everyone would say, ``Right now.'' It's
still the best time to be alive because of technology,
innovation, and everything. And I'm excited about what the
future holds.
But the destructiveness that I've also seen, as a person
that's seen the transformative technologies of a lot of the
technologies of the last 25 years, is what really concerns me.
And one of the things, especially with companies that are
designed to want to keep my attention on screens--and I'm not
just talking about new media; 24-hour cable news is a great
example of people that want to keep your eyes on screens--I
have a lot of concerns about the corporate intention. And, Sam,
this is again why I find your story so fascinating to me and
your values--that I believe in, from our conversations--so
compelling to me.
But absent that, I really want to just explore what happens
when these companies that are already controlling so much of
our lives--a lot has been written about the FAANG companies.
What happens when they are the ones that are dominating this
technology, as they did before? So, Professor Marcus, does that
have any concern, the role that corporate power, corporate
concentration has in this realm, that a few companies might
control this whole area?
Professor Marcus. I radically changed the shape of my own
life in the last few months, and it was because of what
happened with Microsoft releasing Sydney. And it didn't go the
way I thought it would. In one way, it did, which is I
anticipated the hallucinations. I wrote an essay, which I have
in the appendix, ``What to Expect When You're Expecting . . .
GPT-4.''
And I said that it would still be a good tool for
misinformation, that it would still have trouble with physical
reasoning, psychological reasoning, that it would hallucinate.
And then along came Sydney, and the initial press reports were
quite favorable. And then there was the famous article by Kevin
Roose, in which it recommended he get a divorce. And I had seen
Tay, and I had seen Galactica, from Meta, and those had been
pulled after they had problems. And Sydney clearly had
problems.
What I would have done, had I run Microsoft, which clearly
I do not, would have been to temporarily withdraw it from the
market. And they didn't. And that was a wakeup call to me and a
reminder that even if you have a company like OpenAI that is a
nonprofit--and Sam's values, I think, have become clear today--
other people can buy those companies and do what they like with
them. And, you know, maybe we have a stable set of actors now,
but the amount of power that these systems have to shape our
views and our lives is really, really significant.
And that doesn't even get into the risks that someone might
repurpose them deliberately for all kinds of bad purposes. And
so, in the middle of February, I stopped writing much about
technical issues in AI, which is most of what I have written
about for the last decade, and said, ``I need to work on
policy. This is frightening.''
Senator Booker. And, Sam, I want to give you an
opportunity, as my sort of last question or so--don't you have
concerns about--I graduated from Stanford. I know so many of
the players in the Valley, from VC folks, angel folks, to a lot
of founders of companies that we all know. Do you have some
concern about a few players with extraordinary resources and
power, power to influence Washington?
I mean, I see us--I'm a big believer in the free market,
but the reason why I walk into a bodega and a Twinkie is
cheaper than an apple or a Happy Meal costs less than a bucket
of salad is because of the way the Government tips the scales
to pick winners and losers. So, the free market is not what it
should be, when you have large corporate power that can even
influence the game here. Do you have some concerns about that
in this next era of technological innovation?
Mr. Altman. Yes. I mean, again, that's so much of why we
started OpenAI. We have huge concerns about that. I think it's
important to democratize the inputs to these systems, the
values that we're going to align to. And I think it's also
important to give people wide use of these tools. When we
started the API strategy, which is a big part of how we make
our systems available for anyone to use, there was a huge
amount of skepticism over that. And it does come with
challenges, that's for sure. But we think putting this in the
hands of a lot of people and not in the hands of a few
companies is really quite important, and we are seeing the
resultant innovation boom from that.
But it is absolutely true that the number of companies that
can train the true frontier models is going to be small, just
because of the resources required. And so I think there needs
to be incredible scrutiny on us and our competitors. I think
there is a rich and exciting industry happening of incredibly
good research and new startups that are not just using our
models but creating their own. And I think it's important to
make sure that whatever regulatory stuff happens, whatever new
agencies may or may not happen, we preserve that fire, because
that's critical.
Senator Booker. Well, I'm a big believer in the
democratizing potential of technology, but I've seen the
promise of that fail, time and time again, where people said,
``Oh, this is going to have a big democratizing force.'' My
team works on a lot of issues about the reinforcing of bias
through algorithms, the failure to advertise certain
opportunities in certain zip codes. But you seem to be saying,
and I heard this with Web3----
Mr. Altman. Yes.
Senator Booker [continuing]. That this is going to be--
DeFi, decentralized finance, all these things are going to
happen. But this seems to me not even to offer that promise,
because the people who are designing these--it takes so much
power, energy, resources. Are you saying that my dreams of
technology further democratizing opportunity and more are
possible within a technology that is ultimately, I think, going
to be very centralized to a few players who already control so
much?
Mr. Altman. So, this point that I made about use of the
model and building on top of it, as a--this is really a new
platform, right? It is definitely important to talk about who's
going to create the models. I want to do that. I also think
it's really important to decide to whose values we're going to
align these models.
But in terms of using the models, the people that build on
top of the OpenAI API do incredible things. And, you know,
people frequently comment, like, ``I can't believe you get this
much technology for this little money.'' And so what people
are--the companies people are building, putting AI everywhere,
using our API, which does let us put safeguards in place--I
think that's quite exciting. And I think that is how it is
being--not how it's going to be, but how it is being
democratized right now. There is a whole new Cambrian explosion
of new businesses, new products, new services happening by lots
of different companies on top of these models.
Senator Booker. And so I'll say, Chairman, as I close, that
most industries resist even reasonable regulation, from
seatbelt laws to--we've been talking a lot recently about rail
safety. The only way we're going to see the democratization of
values, I think--and while there are noble companies out
there--is if we create rules of the road that enforce certain
safety measures, like we've seen with other technology. Thank
you.
Chair Blumenthal. Thanks, Senator Booker. And I couldn't
agree more that, in terms of consumer protection, which I've
been doing for a while, participation by the industry is
tremendously important, and not just rhetorically, but in real
terms, because we have a lot of industries that come before us
and say, ``Oh, we're all in favor of rules, but not those
rules. Those rules we don't like.'' And it's every rule, in
fact, that they don't like.
And I sense that there is a willingness to participate here
that is genuine and authentic. I thought about asking ChatGPT
to do a new version of ``Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow,''
because that's what we need to be doing here.
[Laughter.]
Chair Blumenthal. And as Senator Hawley has pointed out,
Congress doesn't always move at the pace of technology, and
that may be a reason why we need a new agency, but we also need
to recognize the rest of the world is going to be moving, as
well.
And you've been enormously helpful in focusing us and
illuminating some of these questions and performed a great
service by being here today. So, thank you to every one of our
witnesses. And I'm going to close the hearing, leave the record
open for 1 week in case anyone wants to submit anything. I
encourage any of you who have either manuscripts that are going
to be published or observations from your companies to submit
them to us.
And we look forward to our next hearing. This one is
closed.
[Whereupon, at 12:54 p.m., the hearing was adjourned.]
[Additional material submitted for the record follows.]
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