This week, US senators heard alarming testimony suggesting that unchecked AI might steal jobs, spread misinformation, and customarily “go quite wrong,” within the phrases of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman (no matter meaning). He and a number of other lawmakers agreed that the US could now want a brand new federal company to supervise the event of the expertise. But the listening to additionally noticed settlement that nobody desires to kneecap a expertise that would doubtlessly enhance productiveness and provides the US a lead in a brand new technological revolution.

Worried senators may take into account speaking to Missy Cummings, a onetime fighter pilot and engineering and robotics professor at George Mason University. She research use of AI and automation in security vital methods together with automobiles and plane, and earlier this yr returned to academia after a stint on the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which oversees automotive technology, together with Tesla’s Autopilot and self-driving cars. Cummings’ perspective may assist politicians and policymakers attempting to weigh the promise of much-hyped new algorithms with the dangers that lay forward.

Cummings advised me this week that she left the NHTSA with a way of profound concern in regards to the autonomous methods which are being deployed by many automobile producers. “We’re in serious trouble in terms of the capabilities of these cars,” Cummings says. “They’re not even close to being as capable as people think they are.”

I used to be struck by the parallels with ChatGPT and comparable chatbots stoking pleasure and concern in regards to the energy of AI. Automated driving options have been round for longer, however like giant language fashions they depend on machine studying algorithms which are inherently unpredictable, arduous to examine, and require a unique sort of engineering considering to that of the previous.

Also like ChatGPT, Tesla’s Autopilot and different autonomous driving initiatives have been elevated by absurd quantities of hype. Heady goals of a transportation revolution led automakers, startups, and buyers to pour enormous sums into growing and deploying a expertise that still has many unsolved problems. There was a permissive regulatory atmosphere round autonomous automobiles within the mid-2010s, with authorities officers loath to use brakes on a expertise that promised to be price billions for US companies.

After billions spent on the expertise, self-driving automobiles are nonetheless beset by problems, and a few auto corporations have pulled the plug on massive autonomy initiatives. Meanwhile, as Cummings says, the general public is commonly unclear about how succesful semiautonomous expertise actually is.

In one sense, it’s good to see governments and lawmakers being fast to counsel regulation of generative AI instruments and enormous language fashions. The present panic is centered on giant language fashions and instruments like ChatGPT which are remarkably good at answering questions and solving problems, even when they nonetheless have vital shortcomings, together with confidently fabricating info. 

At this week’s Senate listening to, Altman of OpenAI, which gave us ChatGPT, went as far as to name for a licensing system to regulate whether or not corporations like his are allowed to work on superior AI. “My worst fear is that we—the field, the technology, the industry—cause significant harm to the world,” Altman stated throughout the listening to.