Schumer, Rounds and Heinrich after the first Senate AI forum on Sept. 13. Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Tuesday's Capitol Hill AI forum led by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is set to put some of AI’s biggest boosters and skeptics in the same room.
Driving the news: The forum, scheduled for 3-6pm, features AI companies and VCs Andreessen Horowitz and Kleiner Perkins, along with academics and labor leaders.
- Schumer's first forum headlined CEOs of the biggest tech and AI companies including Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Bill Gates, Sundar Pichai and Elon Musk.
Why it matters: These roundtables are meant to form the basis for AI legislation, and Congress is hearing from wildly divergent voices as the White House and government agencies forge ahead with their own plans.
- Schumer previously told Axios that Tuesday's forum will be about "innovation," both for AI breakthroughs in science, medicine and other areas and also for ensuring AI is safe and sustainable.
The big picture: Schumer's first forum gathered a big group of tech billionaires in one room, attracting tons of press attention.
- With Congress focused on finding a House speaker, addressing the Israel-Hamas war and preventing a government shutdown, conversations and hype around this AI confab have been a lot quieter.
What they're saying: Some expected attendees said they're ready to move past doom-and-gloom threats like major job displacement and sentient AIs ruling over humans and discuss what's in front of them — real-life applications of AI in everyday settings.
- "What a lot of folks really want to do is focus on the things that they already care about and are working on, so that's a real opportunity," Austin Carson, founder and president of SeedAI, a nonprofit that focuses on AI research and development, told Axios. "It's not fanciful... let's not get myopic, let's not get farsighted."
- "The biggest things we have to do is reduce the transaction costs for folks to take their experiences [with AI], and turn them into something that's very useful for policymakers."
- "The narrative can skew toward existential risks or risks that are sort of sci-fi," Aidan Gomez, CEO of Cohere, told Axios. "Those risks are really gripping and exciting, but they take attention away from real tangible risks."
State of play: Two major VC chiefs who will attend are John Doerr, chair of Kleiner Perkins, and general partner and co-founder Marc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz.
- Andreessen recently made waves publishing "The Techno-Optimist Manifesto," which called technology "the engine of perpetual material creation, growth and abundance" and denounced efforts to regulate it.
- "Our enemy is corruption, regulatory capture, monopolies, cartels," he wrote.
The intrigue: That's a strong divergence from many leaders of AI companies, who have been mostly in agreement that regulatory frameworks and perhaps even licensing are necessary to ensure AI safety.
- Derrick Johnson, president and CEO of the NAACP, is set to attend. The NAACP has pushed back against using AI in ways that could exacerbate inequalities and target people of color, like the use of biometric indicators for lending algorithms and for purposes of criminal justice.
- But the civil rights organization has also said it has great potential for narrowing disparities for Black Americans.
- "I'm going to be really trying to tackle head-on the idea that addressing potential risks of AI systems is in some way counter to innovation," Alexandra Reeve Givens, CEO of the Center for Democracy and Technology, told Axios. "That's a false choice."
- "Too often public concerns about the risk of AI are dismissed as anti-innovation... Congress has to reject that false binary."
