At Thursday's Senate Commerce Committee hearing, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) questioned OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and other top AI leaders.
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00Thank you. You know, Senator Klobuchar asked whether AI will lead us to heaven
00:06or hell. It reminded me of a famous observation by Yale Law professor Grant
00:11Gilmore that in heaven there is no law and the lion will lie down with the lamb.
00:17In hell there is nothing but law and due process is meticulously observed. Let me
00:27ask you this, and this is to each of the four witnesses. In the race for AI, who's
00:35winning? America or China? If the answer is America, how close is China to us? And
00:42what do we do to make sure the answer remains America will win? Mr. Altman,
00:48we'll start with you. It is our belief that the American models, including some
00:55models from our company OpenAI and Google and others are the best models in the
00:59world. It's very hard to say how far ahead we are, but I would say not a huge amount
01:04of time. And I think to continue that leadership position and the influence
01:10that comes with that and that all of the incredible benefits of the
01:15world using American technology products and services, the things that my
01:20colleagues have spoken about here, the need to win in infrastructure, sensible
01:24regulation that does not slow us down, the sort of spirit of innovation and
01:28entrepreneurship that I think is a uniquely American thing in the world. None of this
01:34is rocket science. We just need to keep doing the things that have worked for so
01:37long and not make a silly mistake. Dr. Hsu? I'll answer in the realm of chips. I would
01:46say America is ahead in chips today. We have the best AI accelerators in the
01:52world. I think China, although they have restrictions given their ability to use
01:57advanced technologies, the one thing that's very important for us all to
02:01remember is there are multiple ways to do things. You know, having the best chips is
02:04great, but even if you don't have the best chips, you can get a lot done. So I
02:09think this conversation about how far behind China is, they are certainly
02:13catching up because there are many ways to do things. I think relative to what we
02:17can do, I will continue to say really ensure that our spirit of innovation is
02:23allowed to work and that is having, you know, very supportive government policies
02:28to do that, having very consistent policies and allowing us to do what we do
02:32best, which is innovate at every layer of the stack. Mr. Trader? So I'll speak to it
02:41from the physical infrastructure and software stack to deliver that. America is
02:47ahead, but it is the Achilles heel from the perspective of the ability, as I
02:53started to, to, better? Sorry about that. So, so the, the ability to build very large
03:02solutions to the computing infrastructure component of this is an area that we're
03:09going to struggle with from a permitting and building large projects to be able
03:13to deliver the, the power to, to allow those building artificial intelligence to
03:18continue to move as fast as they can in, in the race that we're in. Mr. Smith? I think
03:24the United States has a lead today in what is a close race and a race that will
03:29likely remain close. The number one factor that will define whether the United
03:34States or China wins this race is whose technology is most broadly adopted in the
03:40rest of the world. This is a global market and it will be defined as
03:44technology markets typically are by network effects. 18% of the people of the
03:50world live in China, 4% live in the United States, 78% live somewhere else. The
03:56lesson from Huawei and 5G is whoever gets there first will be difficult to
04:02supplant. We need to export with the right kinds of controls. We need to win the
04:07trust of the rest of the world. We need to have the financial architecture that gets
04:12not only to the countries that are industrialized but the nation say across
04:17Africa where typically China and Huawei have done so well. So some of my
04:23colleagues have made reference to standards as, as something that is
04:28desirable. And I will say standards is often code word for regulations and
04:34indeed the EU stifling standards concerning the internet is what killed
04:40tech in Europe. We are seeing now state legislatures mimicking the EU such as
04:46California's SB 1047 which thankfully was overwhelmingly defeated but would have
04:52created essentially a California DMV for AI model registration. How harmful would it be to
05:01winning the race for AI if America goes down goes down the road of the EU and
05:07creates a heavy-handed prior approval government regulatory process for AI?
05:12I think that would be disastrous. To give a more specific answer to your previous
05:21question which I think touches on why it would be so bad, there are three key
05:27inputs to these AI systems. There's compute, all the infrastructure we're talking
05:31about, there's algorithms that we all do research on, and there's data. If you
05:38don't have any one of those, you cannot succeed in making the best models. And as
05:42Brad said, the way for America to influence the world here is to have the
05:46technology that people most want to use and most adopt. The world uses iPhones and
05:51Google and Microsoft products and that's wonderful. Like that's how we have our
05:55influence. We don't, we don't want that to stop happening. So systems that stop us on
06:00any of these areas, you know, if we, if we have, if we have rules about what data we can
06:04train on that are not competitive with the rest of the world, then things can fall
06:08apart. If we are not able to build the infrastructure, and particularly if we're
06:11not able to manufacture the chips in this country, the rules can fall apart. If we
06:15can't build the products that people want, that naturally win in the market, and I
06:18think people do want to use American products, we can make them the best. But
06:21if we're prevented from doing that, people will use a better product made from
06:24somebody else that doesn't have the sort of, you know, that is not stymied in the
06:29same way. So it is, I am nervous about standards being set too early. I'm totally
06:38fine, you know, at the position some of my colleagues took that standards, once the
06:42industry figures out what they should be, it's fine for them to be adopted by a
06:45government body and sort of made more official. But I believe the industry is
06:48moving quickly towards figuring out the right protocols and standards here, and we
06:53need the space to innovate and to move quickly. So if each of you could briefly
06:56answer that question, because my time's expired, so I want to be respectful of
06:59that. I agree with the comments. That's him. I agree, and I would just say, and I
07:08think the point you're making is, we have to be very careful not to have these
07:11pre-approval requirements, including at state levels, because that would really
07:17slow innovation in the country. I think that a patchwork of regulatory overlays
07:25will cause friction in in the ability to build and extend what we're doing.
07:34Thank you. Senator Curtis.