Elon Musk meets Congress leader Schumer to warn of AI apocalypse

Elon Musk met with US Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer on Wednesday to outline his fears surrounding artificial intelligence.

The SpaceX, Tesla and Twitter CEO told reporters that they talked about “the future” in a meeting that lasted around an hour.

“Met with @SenSchumer and many members of Congress about artificial intelligence regulation today,” Mr Musk tweeted.

“That which affects safety of the public has, over time, become regulated to ensure that companies do not cut corners. AI has great power to do good and evil. Better the former.”

Mr Musk has frequently spoken about his concerns with advanced AI, previously claiming that they are “more dangerous than nukes” and pose an existential threat to humanity.

Schumer told reporters he had a very good meeting with Mr Musk. “We talked about Buffalo (New York) – Tesla has a large plant in Buffalo. And we talked about AI,” according to CNN and Politico.

Earlier this month, Mr Schumer, a Democrat, said he had launched an effort to establish rules on artificial intelligence to address national security and education concerns, as use of programs like ChatGPT becomes widespread.

Mr Schumer said he had drafted and circulated a “framework that outlines a new regulatory regime that would prevent potentially catastrophic damage to our country while simultaneously making sure the US advances and leads in this transformative technology.”

In March, Mr Musk and a group of artificial intelligence experts and industry executives called for a six-month pause in developing systems more powerful than OpenAI’s newly launched GPT-4, in an open letter citing potential risks to society.

“Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable,” said the letter issued by the Future of Life Institute.

There is a growing push in Washington for AI regulations. Senate Intelligence Committee chair Mark Warner, a Democrat, sent major AI CEOs a letter Wednesday asking them to take steps to address concerns.

Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, a Democrat, told reporters Wednesday the Biden administration is working “as aggressively as possible to figure out our approach” to AI.

“The challenge is you don’t want to stifle innovation in a brand new area with massive potential,” Ms Raimondo said. “The risks related to misinformation and deep fakes etcetera are massive.”

In January, Mr Musk met two top White House officials in Washington to discuss how Tesla and the administration of President Joe Biden could work together to advance electric vehicle production. He also visited with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, a Republican, in a meeting earlier this year.

Earlier this month, Mr Musk said he was working on an alternative to OpenAI’s popular AI chatbot ChatGPT.

The tech billionaire said his AI, dubbed TruthGPT, would be a “maximum truth-seeking AI” that would try to “understand the nature of the universe” and serve as the “best path to safety”.

Additional reporting from agencies