Vice President Kamala Harris and other US administration officials will discuss ways to ensure consumers benefit from AI while being protected from its harms, according to a copy of an invitation seen by AFP.
US President Joe Biden expects tech companies to make sure products are safe before being released to the public, the invitation said.
US regulators last month took a step towards drawing up rules on AI that could see the White House put the brakes on new technologies such as ChatGPT.
The US Department of Commerce put out a call for input from industry actors that would serve to inform the Biden administration in drafting regulation on AI.
"Just as food and cars are not released into the market without proper assurance of safety, so too AI systems should provide assurance to the public, government, and businesses that they are fit for purpose," the Commerce Department said in a statement at the time.
The United States is home to the biggest innovators in tech and AI -- including Microsoft-backed OpenAI, which created ChatGPT -- but trails internationally in regulating the industry.
Google in March invited users in the United States and Britain to test its AI chatbot, known as Bard, as it continues on its gradual path to catch up with ChatGPT.
Biden has urged Congress to pass laws putting stricter limits on the tech sector, but these efforts have little chance of making headway given political divisions among lawmakers.
The lack of rules has given Silicon Valley freedom to put out new products rapidly -- and stoked fears that AI technologies will wreak havoc on society before the government can catch up.
Billionaire Elon Musk in early March formed an AI company called X.AI, based in the US state of Nevada, according to business documents.
Musk, who is already the boss of Twitter and Tesla, is listed as director of X.AI Corporation, a state business filing indicated.
Musk's founding of what appears to be a rival to OpenAI came despite him recently joining tech leaders and AI critics in calling for an overall pause in the development of artificial intelligence.
Google, Meta and Microsoft have spent years working on AI systems to help with translations, internet searches, security and targeted advertising.
But late last year San Francisco firm OpenAI supercharged the interest in the AI sphere when it launched ChatGPT, a bot that can generate natural-seeming text responses from short prompts.
IBM eyes hiring pause because AI does the job
Washington (AFP) May 2, 2023 -
The CEO of IBM said he was eyeing to downsize the tech giant's back office workforce by nearly a third because those jobs are being made redundant by advances in artificial intelligence.
In an interview with Bloomberg on Monday, Arvind Krishna said that his company would enact a pause in hiring in those roles, and potentially reduce the payroll by 7,800 jobs over several years.
"These non-customer-facing roles amount to roughly 26,000 workers," Krishna said. "I could easily see 30 percent of that getting replaced by AI and automation over a five-year period."
Back office employees are only a fraction of IBM's roughly 260,000 workers, and the company has continued to hire in certain roles, even after recently letting go about 5,000 workers in other areas, the Bloomberg report said.
In a statement to AFP on Tuesday, an IBM spokesman cautioned that "there is no blanket hiring 'pause' in place" at the company, based in Armonk, New York.
"We're being very selective when filling jobs that don't directly touch our clients or technology," the IBM spokesman added.
The development of generative AI, as demonstrated by viral applications like ChatGPT, is making it possible to more easily execute less complex work such as certain human resource tasks, data management and other repetitive operations.
A study by Goldman Sachs in March said that as many as 300 million jobs could be lost to AI-powered automation, and one-fourth of current work tasks in the United States and Europe could be automated.
But while the release of ChatGPT took the world by storm late last year, the technology, developed by Microsoft-backed OpenAI, is prone to mistakes and has led companies to only entrust it with simple tasks for now.
On Monday, Geoffrey Hinton, sometimes considered the godfather of AI, announced that he was leaving Google's industry-leading AI research team and criticized Microsoft for moving too quickly in making ChatGPT-style technology available.
Hinton said that competition between tech giants was pushing companies to release new AI technologies at dangerous speeds, threatening jobs and posing a danger to society.
ChatGPT sends shares in online learning giants into tailspin
New York (AFP) May 2, 2023 -
Shares in companies that specialize in publishing school textbooks and offering online classes took a big hit on Tuesday after signs emerged that AI-bots such as ChatGPT were eating into their business.
Silicon Valley-based Chegg is an education tech company that provides online homework help and textbooks, and on Monday its CEO admitted that the explosion of generative AI chatbots had hurt revenue.
"In the first part of the year, we saw no noticeable impact from ChatGPT on our new account growth and we were meeting expectations on new sign-ups," Chegg CEO Dan Rosensweig told analysts on Monday.
"However, since March we saw a significant spike in student interest in ChatGPT. We now believe it's having an impact on our new customer growth rate," he added.
Specifically, the 18-year-old company reported a sales drop of seven percent over one year as well as a five percent fall in subscribers.
The admission sent shockwaves through the ed tech sector pushing Chegg's share price down by almost 50 percent and hammering similar companies such as UK-based Pearson, that lost 15 percent in London.
The chief executive insisted that the students' pivot to ChatGPT was a blip and that clients who kept their faith in the company's products "continue to choose us and retain us at high rates."
He also said it launched its own AI-powered tool called CheggMate, that was tailored to students and based on GPT-4, the latest iteration of the technology created by Microsoft-backed OpenAI and that powers ChatGPT.
Chegg has in the past faced the same accusations addressed to ChatGPT of providing students with readymade ways to cheat, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic when test-taking was largely taking place online outside a teacher's supervision.
While ChatGPT-style AI has largely been seen as a boon for the economy, the implosion in education tech stocks was the clearest example yet of the technology's capabilities assailing a company's bottom line.
Given the technology's untested nature, experts believe that the companies most vulnerable to AI for now are businesses that require little specialization - such as call centers or tutoring services as offered by Chegg and others.
For the time being, "you're only going to see very specific kinds of tasks that people are willing to farm out to generative AI," said Vishal Gupta, an associate professor at the USC Marshall School of Business.
These tasks are going to be "lower stakes" given the uncertainties about the technology, he added.
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