If you actually watch the entire session, Altman does address that and recommend to Congress that regulations 1) not be applied to small startups, individual researchers, or open source, and 2) that they not be done in such a way as to lock in a few big vendors. Some of the Senators on the panel also expressed concern about #2.
how will that work? Isn't OpenAI itself a small startup? I don't see how they can regulate AI at all. Sure, the resources required to push the limits are high right now but hardware is constantly improving and getting cheaper. I can take the GPUs out of my kids computers and start doing fairly serious AI work myself. Do i need a license? The cat is out of the bag, there's no stopping it now.
Compute continues to get cheaper and cheaper. We have not hit the physics wall yet on that.
That and if someone cracks efficient distributed training in a swarm type configuration then you could train models Seti@Home style. Lots of people would be happy to leave a gaming PC on to help create open source LLMs. The data requirements might be big but I just got gigabit fiber installed in my house so that barrier is vanishing too.
Though the other day Yuval Noah Harari gave a great talk on the potential threat to democracy - https://youtu.be/LWiM-LuRe6w