Wiredreports that the over 60 senators “sat like school children,” forbidden from speaking or raising their hands. And to be fair, the intent of the forum was to be educational — but you’d be right to question the authority of a teacher who doesn’t let their pupils ask questions.
Given the guests in attendance, their compliance may as well have been peremptory. Notables included Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.
You don’t need to do the exact math to know that their combined net worths rival that of a small, disproportionately wealthy nation.
Not all were on board with being on the receiving end of a schooling. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) complained that the private nature of the meeting and the lack of input from senators was counterproductive to actual lawmaking, and stifled the chance for cooperation.
“There’s no feeling in the room,” Warren told Wired . “Closed-door [sessions] for tech giants to come in and talk to senators and answer no tough questions is a terrible precedent for trying to develop any kind of legislation.”
To me it sounds like the tech folks who were most likely trying to clamp down on AI thought that they would be in the lead. Scared that somebody would crank out an revolutionary AI product in their single bedroom apartment and not in the grasp of one of their respective companies. Better to squish the competition now than try later.
Huh. From the onebox, I wondered if they were hitting a data void where IMDB was one of the few sources sampled for the model, but no, this is straight artificial plagiarism.
Yikes, I am hoping betteridge’s law doesn’t apply here, this seems like pretty clearcut harrassment. Even if I drew detailed nude drawings of a classmate or even a sloppy photoshop face-replacement and sent them to without their request or consent, I would certainly expect there would be some consequences.
The herd has long bolted Bezos, who’s going to clean that Augean pile of shit left behind you grubby billionaire.
ETA
Does this mean I have to find some new scary samples to show my students of how they are trying to steal from them by selling useless shit? I guess it does. I’m sure it won’t be hard.
