The AI safety battle of 2024 came to a head with SB 1047, a bill supported by two highly regarded AI researchers: Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio. The bill tried to prevent advanced AI systems from causing mass human extinction events and cyberattacks that could cause more damage than 2024’s CrowdStrike outage.
SB 1047 passed through California’s Legislature, making it all the way to Governor Gavin Newsom’s desk, where he called it a bill with “outsized impact.” The bill tried to prevent the kinds of things Musk, Altman, and many other Silicon Valley leaders warned about in 2023 when they signed those open letters on AI.