California’s legislature just passed AI bill SB 1047; here’s why some hope the governor won’t sign it
SB 1047 has drawn the ire of Silicon Valley players large and small, including venture capitalists, big tech trade groups, researchers and startup founders.
Outside of sci-fi films, there’s no precedent for AI systems killing people or being used in massive cyberattacks. However, some lawmakers want to implement safeguards before bad actors make that dystopian future a reality. A California bill, known as SB 1047, tries to stop real-world disasters caused by AI systems before they happen. It passed the state’s senate in August, and now awaits an approval or veto from California Governor Gavin Newsom.
While this seems like a goal we can all agree on, SB 1047 has drawn the ire of Silicon Valley players large and small, including venture capitalists, big tech trade groups, researchers and startup founders. A lot of AI bills are flying around the country right now, but California’s Safe and Secure Innovation for Frontier Artificial Intelligence Models Act has become one of the most controversial. Here’s why.
What would SB 1047 do?
SB 1047 tries to prevent large AI models from being used to cause “critical harms” against humanity.
The bill gives examples of “critical harms” as a bad actor using an AI model to create a weapon that results in mass casualties, or instructing one to orchestrate a cyberattack causing more than $500 million in damages (for comparison, the CrowdStrike outage is estimated to have caused upwards of $5 billion). The bill makes developers — that is, the companies that develop the models — liable for implementing sufficient safety protocols to prevent outcomes like these.
What models and companies are subject to these rules?
SB 1047’s rules would only apply to the world’s largest AI models: ones that cost at least $100 million and use 10^26 FLOPS (floating point operations, a way of measuring computation) during training. That’s a huge amount of compute, though OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said GPT-4 cost about this much to train. These thresholds could be raised as needed.
Very few companies today have developed public AI products large enough to meet those requirements, but tech giants such as OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft are likely to very soon. AI models — essentially, massive statistical engines that identify and predict patterns in data — have generally become more accurate as they’ve grown larger, a trend many expect to continue. Mark Zuckerberg recently said the next generation of Meta’s Llama will require 10x more compute, which would put it under the authority of SB 1047.