Jeremy Howard on ABC Weekend Breakfast
00:00:00.000 | We must be clear eyed and vigilant about the threats emerging from emerging technologies
00:00:05.800 | that can pose, don't have to, but can pose to our democracy and our values.
00:00:11.240 | Well, that's US President Joe Biden there speaking after signing the consensus with
00:00:17.520 | seven leading tech companies, including Meta, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI.
00:00:23.560 | So AI and tech entrepreneur Jeremy Howard wrote about this very topic just a few months ago.
00:00:29.760 | He joins us now from Brisbane.
00:00:31.360 | Jeremy, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us.
00:00:34.480 | You're welcome, Fazia.
00:00:36.560 | So let's start off with the very obvious here.
00:00:39.160 | These safeguards are voluntary.
00:00:41.600 | They're signed by seven major tech companies.
00:00:45.980 | These tech companies compete with each other really.
00:00:48.920 | So what's the point of this agreement?
00:00:52.440 | Well, the basic idea here is that AI has come a long way in the last year or two.
00:00:58.640 | And if you've ever used something like chat GPT, you'll have seen that you can now literally
00:01:02.680 | hold a conversation with an artificial intelligence model on almost any topic.
00:01:08.160 | Sometimes it says ridiculous things, but most of the time you'll have a pretty decent conversation.
00:01:12.960 | The technology's come to a whole new level.
00:01:15.600 | This is going to be a great productivity booster.
00:01:18.240 | There's a lot of things that are much easier to do now for more people than there used
00:01:21.760 | to be.
00:01:22.760 | But of course, some of those things could be bad things.
00:01:25.520 | And so people do worry about the misuse of this technology as well.
00:01:29.500 | We do understand the pros and cons of AI, but it's a voluntary agreement.
00:01:36.880 | It's a voluntary consensus.
00:01:38.640 | Is this just a PR job for the tech companies?
00:01:44.240 | I worry it actually might be something more than that.
00:01:47.160 | My concern is this is the American government starting an agreement with seven American
00:01:51.480 | firms on a vastly powerful technology that America's the clear leader in.
00:01:57.400 | I find this an overly cozy regulatory relationship, to be honest.
00:02:02.040 | And it might be pretty bad news for Australia.
00:02:05.960 | Australia relies on the ability to access what's called open source, which is to say
00:02:09.880 | we don't have any of these models ourselves.
00:02:12.680 | We haven't built any of these in Australia.
00:02:15.080 | So we rely on being able to access the weights of these models that are released on the internet.
00:02:20.440 | And under this voluntary agreement, they're saying, actually, they are not going to do
00:02:23.960 | that anymore.
00:02:24.960 | And it's going to put Australia and other countries in a pretty challenging situation.
00:02:29.440 | It does seem, too, that these tech companies are able to make a jump there on actual shaping
00:02:36.400 | of policies when it comes to regulating AI.
00:02:39.240 | Am I reading that right?
00:02:40.680 | Yes, exactly.
00:02:41.680 | I mean, we're seeing the head of OpenAI, Sam Altman, visiting world leaders, hanging out
00:02:47.280 | with Joe Biden, we're seeing Eric Schmidt from Google going around Congress lobbying.
00:02:54.160 | There's a huge amount of lobbying going on and a very, very cozy relationship developing
00:02:59.440 | between big tech and the American government.
00:03:02.960 | And also starting to see signs of that in Europe as well.
00:03:06.120 | I think this should be a big worry, particularly for countries like Australia, if we're going
00:03:11.760 | to get onto the frontier of this, then it's going to be harder and harder the more regulatory
00:03:18.240 | barriers Australia's face to accessing these big markets.
00:03:23.280 | So what can Australia do then?
00:03:24.760 | Be involved in the lobbying, make sure that they're in the room as well?
00:03:29.240 | I think first and foremost, Australia needs to really get our game together when it comes
00:03:32.940 | to the technology.
00:03:34.200 | So all of these models are built on a single set of technologies called deep learning and
00:03:38.720 | neural networks.
00:03:40.040 | That's an area which Australia unfortunately is not at the forefront of.
00:03:44.200 | There's basically no funding for this.
00:03:46.360 | If you think about groups like Google's DeepMind or Google's Brain, you can see from their
00:03:51.440 | names that they're all about building and harnessing these neural networks.
00:03:55.800 | So Australia actually just needs to get back on the technology leadership here.
00:03:59.000 | We need funding for this kind of technology.
00:04:01.520 | We need to be working hard to bring the many brilliant expats back into Australia who have
00:04:06.120 | been fleeing the countries in years because of the lack of technical leadership in this
00:04:09.960 | area.
00:04:10.960 | Once we've managed to return to a position of technical leadership like we had in the
00:04:15.960 | early days of computing, for example, then we'll be much better placed to actually lobby
00:04:20.560 | because we'll have Australian companies and Australian projects that we can lobby for.
00:04:24.640 | Jeremy, just going back to this voluntary agreement that the major tech companies have
00:04:29.880 | signed with the White House, the four main takeaways that I'm getting from this agreement
00:04:35.000 | is security testing of AI, watermarks to flood something that is AI generated, being transparent
00:04:41.800 | about AI capabilities, working against bias, discrimination and invasion of privacy, all
00:04:47.520 | well and good.
00:04:48.520 | But I do wonder if we take the speed at which AI is evolving, can it even be regulated?
00:04:56.760 | So that's a really great question, but I first want to mention a key fifth component that's
00:05:01.640 | been little noticed, which is the key fifth component is also that they're committing
00:05:05.480 | to not sharing these models with other people, keeping them secret.
00:05:11.480 | My guess is actually that this kind of regulation will not only be pointless, but actually damaging
00:05:17.480 | to global safety and to global innovation.
00:05:20.920 | As you're kind of implying, this probably isn't possible to directly regulate.
00:05:25.760 | I think what we need instead is a much more democratic approach where everybody has access
00:05:30.440 | to this powerful technology, just like everybody has access to the vote and everybody has access
00:05:35.360 | to education, everybody has access to the internet.
00:05:38.760 | It's not by restricting these things to an elite few that we see, you know, society thrive.
00:05:44.800 | It's actually through giving society access to these things that we see it thrive.
00:05:48.760 | And I think that's the safer approach, most likely.
00:05:51.400 | Jeremy, it's such a fascinating topic.
00:05:53.720 | Thank you so much for sharing your insights with us on this Sunday morning.
00:05:57.400 | We're glad to have you on the show. Jeremy Howard, there, tech entrepreneur.
00:06:02.680 | Thank you.
00:06:04.560 | Thank you.
00:06:04.840 | [BLANK_AUDIO]