00:00More than 1,000 workers from top AI firms have signed a petition calling on the U.S. government to
00:05help, quote, deliberately pace AI development.
00:09The signatories of the letter include the CEO of Anthropic and the chief scientists from OpenAI and Meta Superintelligence Lab.
00:17Let's get more. Bloomberg's AI editor, Seth Figerman, is with us.
00:21This has been playing out on social media, too, as more high-profile names become literal signatories to it.
00:28Let's start with the idea.
00:30Like, what is it that this group of those in industry, researchers working on AI, are trying to affect?
00:37What is the result that they're looking for?
00:39Yeah, you know, Ed, it's really a moment to step back and take stock of.
00:43They're calling for basically a technical and policy framework that governments or international group could use at some point, if
00:52necessary, to, quote, deliberately pace AI development.
00:57They're not specifically calling to slow it down, though that seems to be the implication.
01:02And, you know, the backstory seems to be both a growing awareness that AI might one day be able to
01:09kind of automate itself, that they're building technology that can kind of conduct its own research and development.
01:14And then it's sort of kind of supercharge and accelerate that development in ways that could potentially create runaway AI
01:19progress that we may not be there at the moment.
01:21And then, as you were just talking about, it comes days after the first of now two different but related
01:28breaches from OpenAI's technology that have raised heightened concerns.
01:33Let's use Anthropic as a case study.
01:35They made a social post on Tuesday yesterday explaining their people's participation.
01:43You know, they are one of the leading frontier labs working on advancing AI.
01:48And they're saying, we're OK with joining this effort to, let's call it, slow it down.
01:53You're right.
01:54And in some ways, I think it's actually borrowing from some of Anthropic's earlier rhetoric.
01:58I mean, you might recall that Jack Clark, one of Anthropic's co-founders, you know, had put out a lengthy
02:02post weeks or maybe a couple months ago calling for the idea that maybe we would want a pause button
02:09or a mechanism to pause AI development, stopping short of saying we need it now or it's definitive, but kind
02:15of introducing that idea.
02:17And I think that thought has been percolating a lot now in recent weeks, whether it's Demis Hassabis kind of
02:22calling for some sort of international framework or a FINRA type organization to vet and review models or a more
02:29explicit call to slow or pause development.
02:32Again, there's a lot of ifs, ands or buts here.
02:34But it seems like the industry is increasingly captivated by this thought that there needs to be some mechanism to
02:39slow, pause or rethink the pace of development.
02:42To end, Seth, the petition is urging the U.S. government to do something, to take some kind of action
02:49in conjunction with something that's happening around the world anyway in different jurisdictions.
02:53Do we have a sense of what that would look like from the U.S. government?
02:56Are we talking about Congress taking action and executive order?
03:00What's the mechanism?
03:01Certainly in that petition, they're not spelling it out, but coming weeks after Demis and Sam Altman have kind of
03:08been advocating for more of an international coalition, I would think of it in that mold.
03:13I don't know if that's just the Trump administration lending its support or a particular piece of legislation from Congress,
03:19but I think it's the idea of the U.S. working with part of an international body to begin to
03:24rethink how we govern this technology.
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