To expound, this just seems like a power grab to me, to "lock in" the lead and keep AI controlled by a small number of corporations that can afford to license and operate the technologies. Obviously, this will create a critical nexus of control for a small number of well connected and well heeled investors and is to be avoided at all costs.
It's also deeply troubling that regulatory capture is such an issue these days as well, so putting a government entity in front of the use and existence of this technology is a double whammy — it's not simply about innovation.
The current generation of AIs are "scary" to the uninitiated because they are uncanny valley material, but beyond impersonation they don't show the novel intelligence of a GPI... yet. It seems like OpenAI/Microsoft is doing a LOT of theater to try to build a regulatory lock in on their short term technology advantage. It's a smart strategy, and I think Congress will fall for it.
But goodness gracious we need to be going in the EXACT OPPOSITE direction — open source "core inspectable" AIs that millions of people can examine and tear apart, including and ESPECIALLY the training data and processes that create them.
And if you think this isn't an issue, I wrote this post an hour or two before I managed to take it live because Comcast went out at my house, and we have no viable alternative competitors in my area. We're about to do the same thing with AI, but instead of Internet access it's future digital brains that can control all aspects of a society.
If you take seriously any downsides, whether misinformation or surveillance or laundering bias or x-risk, how does AI model weights or training data being open source solve them? Open source is a lot of things, but one thing it's not is misuse-resistant (and the "with many eyes all bugs are shallow" thing hasn't proved true in practice even with high level code, much less giant matrices and terabytes of text). Is there a path forward that doesn't involve either a lot of downside risk (even if mostly for people who aren't on HN and interested in tinkering with frontier models themselves, in the worlds where surveillance or bias is the main problem), or significant regulation?
I don't particularly like or trust Altman but I don't think he'd be obviously less self-serving if he were to oppose any regulation.