Stories on the latest in policy, responsible AI, and where AI is going. Plus, is there middle ground between e/acc and decel?

Policy

• US Senate AI Insight Forums #8 and #9 wrapped up: “Senate co-hosts indicated that key committees will begin ramping up efforts to craft bipartisan AI legislation in the coming months.” Among the first, a House committee released a landmark report arguing for much more extensive investment restrictions in US-China private markets.
• EU AI Act: deal on comprehensive rules for trustworthy AI: “Safeguards agreed on general purpose AI; limitation for the use of biometric ID systems by law enforcement; bans on social scoring and AI used to manipulate/exploit user vulnerabilities” – full text to be published in 2024 (more here)
• Commentary on China’s AI regulation: “Beijing Internet Court’s ruling that content generated by AI can be covered by copyright has caused a stir in the AI community, not least because it clashes with the stances adopted in other major jurisdictions, including the US”
• Brookings’ cluster analysis of national AI strategies: finds “certain countries are prioritizing the realization of the promises of AI while others are more concerned with mitigating its risks” after analyzing 30+ countries as high, medium, low on six factors (ex. data management)

Responsible AI

• Startups are the missing perspective in the AI debate: “It's incumbent, not just for the administration, but members of Congress, to get out and hear the earliest-stage innovators, what they're worried about and have a frank conversation.” – Gaurab Bansal, RIL
• OpenAI outlines its work on Safety Systems: “addresses emerging safety issues and develops new fundamental solutions to enable the safe deployment of our most advanced models and future AGI, to make AI that is beneficial and trustworthy”
• Intel goes after responsible AI with ethics index patent: aiming to prevent legally and ethically inappropriate uses of AI, “the system uses a ‘trust mapping engine’ that’s given policy thresholds as guidelines for mapping training data to inference data”
• Resources: Converge 2 company applications open

Where AI is going

• How Sam Altman's OpenAI drama highlighted the debate splitting Silicon Valley: Are you an e/acc or decel?: “That's not to say there isn't a middle ground…‘If you haven't built responsibly and with trust you stand a high risk of wiping out your shareholders,’ said Gaurab Bansal, the executive director of RIL. His advice to Silicon Valley: ‘I would encourage any watchers of the industry to not get stuck in a divisive set of rhetoric’” (more here)
• Vertical AI: “We’ve seen vertical-focused startups think outside of traditional SaaS models and instead employ strategies like embedded payments (Toast and Shopify), advertising, and B2B marketplaces. Adoption of AI will accelerate this transformation”
• Releases: Mistral’s platform services; Cerebras’ gigaGPT; Microsoft’s Phi-2; Google’s AI Studio; Delphi; demo of Tesla’s Optimus Gen 2
• Raises: Chalk ($10M seed, data); Hyperlane ($6M seed, user behavior); Barnyard Games ($3.4M seed, games); Andalusia Labs ($48M Series A, digital asset risk); PursueCare ($20M Series B, telehealth); open source AI grants; Playground ($410M fund); Partech (€360M fund)
• More: OpenAI partners with Axel Springer to deepen use of AI in journalism (publishing house of POLITICO, Business Insider, more); Microsoft and labor unions form ‘historic’ alliance on AI

ICYMI

• 5 steps to build your first GTM playbook (from SaaStr’s Workshop Wednesday series)
• Hilary Mason, Hidden Door co-founder, on deterministic vs. probabilistic, and how AI is changing storytelling
• IBM and Meta launch the AI Alliance to support open innovation and open science in AI