President Joe Biden attended a meeting at the White House on Thursday with the CEOs of leading artificial intelligence companies, including Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Microsoft, to discuss risks and precautions as the technology gains attention from governments and lawmakers around the world, according to data . Reuters.

Artificial intelligence has become a buzzword this year as apps like ChatGPT have captured the public’s interest, prompting a rush among companies to launch similar products that they believe will change the way work is done.

Millions of users have begun testing the tools, which supporters say can make medical diagnoses, write scripts, create legal memos and debug software, raising concerns about how the technology could lead to privacy breaches, biased employment decisions and fuel fraud. disinformation campaigns.

Biden, who “walked into a meeting,” also used ChatGPT, a White House official told Reuters. “He was briefed in detail about ChatGPT and (conducted) experiments with it,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The two-hour meeting Thursday features Google’s Sundar Pichai, Microsoft Corp.’s Satya Nadella, OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, as well as Vice President Kamala Harris and administration officials, including Jeff Zients, Biden’s chief of staff, adviser from national security. Jake Sullivan, National Economic Council Director Lyle Brainard and Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo.

Harris said the technology has the potential to improve lives, but could raise security, privacy and civil rights concerns.

She told the CEOs that they have a “legal responsibility” to ensure the safety of their AI products, and that the administration is open to pushing for new rules and supporting new AI legislation.

Ahead of the meeting, OpenAI’s Altman told reporters that the White House wanted to “fix everything.”

“It’s good to try to get ahead of it,” he said when asked if the White House was moving fast enough on AI regulation. “It will certainly be a difficult challenge, but I am confident that we will be up to it.”

The administration also announced a $140 million investment from the National Science Foundation to launch seven new artificial intelligence research institutes and said the White House Office of Management and Budget will issue policy guidance on the federal government’s use of AI.

Leading AI developers, including Anthropic, Google, Hugging Face, NVIDIA Corp, OpenAI and Stability AI, will participate in a public evaluation of their AI systems. (photo: Jakub Jirsak, Dreamstime.com)