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The AI news cycle continues to be unrelenting. We wrote standalone dispatches for what we think are the two most important stories of the day. Below is an effort to convey a sense of the rest, by way of some quotes that stand out.
Microsoft’s head of AI Mustafa Suleyman, in an essay shared with Axios.
[AI can] achieve many of the big scientific breakthroughs that we all care about and deliver on things like medical superintelligence simply by being aligned to human interests and not trying to weigh up its own interests or welfare.
What it can tell us:
Combined with the misunderstandings evident in Microsoft’s recent Humanist Code of Conduct, this indicates that Suleyman doesn’t understand or doesn’t appreciate the fact that aligning AI to anything at all is an unsolved problem. Choosing what to align it to will also be fraught with peril, but we’re not there yet. This is a pretty shocking deficiency to see in the leader of a major AI lab.
Suleyman is also doubling down (here and elsewhere) on his idea that AI consciousness is closely linked to rogue behavior and must be avoided for that reason. He also seems to think that consciousness can be avoided by simply asking the model not to see itself as conscious or worthy of moral consideration. Both are pretty amateur consciousness takes that would have been quickly shot down on internet forums decades ago.
Vice President JD Vance, speaking at an AI conference this week:
If you’re building Frankenstein, stop. [...] If you’re gonna create Frankenstein, don’t come to the government and say we need regulation. [...] Look inward and accept that if you’re building Frankenstein, No 1, you should stop and No 2, when companies come to you and say: ‘We need the tools to fight back against Frankenstein,’ give them those tools.
What it can tell us:
Vance openly favors self-regulation on issues labs can address themselves, whether said labs choose to exercise responsible restraint or not. Does he think an official exhortation to not build Frankenstein is sufficient?
If he thinks that only bad, non-U.S. company actors would build Frankenstein, then Vance’s line about “tools to fight back” may be signaling agreement that the government should honor the companies’ requests for help with anti-proliferation — protecting their model weights and algorithms from theft and distillation. But he may also just be saying, “Call me when you’ve actually built Frankenstein.”
Vance either doesn’t know Frankenstein was the doctor and not the monster, or he knows and doesn’t care. I’m not sure which annoys me more.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, to Axios yesterday, talking about next week’s AI meetings in D.C. with top Chinese leadership, where he will be lead negotiator:
The United States remains the leader in AI. And we are open to discussions on avoiding shared risks and avoiding bifurcation of our two systems. We expect our discussions to cover both open and closed weight models.
What it can tell us:
Bessent is softening — or distancing himself from — the President’s recent language on China, perhaps so there’s a reason to meet at all.
He’s possibly being careful to avoid saying what he considers a “shared risk” so as to allow people to assume loss-of-control issues are in the mix without outwardly contradicting Trump’s labeling of the extinction threat as a “hoax.”
Bessent probably recognizes that complex diplomacy often begins with both sides looking for common ground about things neither wants to see happen. Nuts and bolts implementation details can wait.
King Charles, in his opening remarks at an AI summit attended by the heads of Nvidia and Google DeepMind, along with representatives from OpenAI and Anthropic:
Those in our world who value our humanity and its vital moral component are anxiously seeking your reassurance that we will not lose control of our destiny.
What it can tell us:
The monarch has tweaked his language about this conference, which was in the works before Jacob Coxon’s viral resignation announcement turned the world’s attention to the threat of human extinction. But Charles is still mostly talking about misuse and secondary harms, including in this quote, depending on how you choose to read it. I think the ambiguity is intentional.
He either hopes AI leaders can head off that threat with a gentleman’s agreement or is trying to play the good cop to regulators’ bad cop.
Nobody seems to expect anything to come of this meeting, and I don’t either, but I still approve. If you’re going to be a symbolic figurehead for a nation, drawing attention to problems and inviting people to hash them out is the kind of thing you should be doing to earn your keep. My only reservation is the danger of reinforcing the false idea that we need the AI leaders’ cooperation or permission to stop the AI race.
Nobel laureate and “AI Godfather” Geoffrey Hinton, in a closed-door warning to U.S. lawmakers, when discussing how long Congress might have to implement safeguards on AI. (As reported by NBC News):
Maybe a year, but not much more than a year. If you look at predictions for when we’ll get superintelligence, it used to be maybe 30 years, maybe 50 years. Then it came down to maybe 10 years, maybe 20 years. Now people are saying, a lot of the researchers are saying only a few years.
What it can tell us:
Hinton wisely wants lawmakers to skate to where the puck is going, not where it is now. Based on the trend he describes, researchers currently saying superintelligence could be “only a few years” out might soon be saying “only a few months” out.
Hinton has really been keeping up, and now feels freer to not mince words. He used to talk about how he has sometimes held back on his expressed alarm because other experts weren’t so worried.
You love to see it. All the straight talk seems to be working to invite more straight talk: Rep. Ted Lieu came out of the meeting saying “This is bats--- crazy, insane science fiction stuff that literally happened recently.”
The analyses and opinions expressed on AI StopWatch reflect the views of the individual contributors and the sources they cover, and should not be taken as official positions of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute.