Former President Barack Obama recently said that Democrats need to make artificial intelligence one of their central agendas and have a very clear path to address concerns around the technology's economic impact and safety.
According to the New York Times, former President Obama made these comments on Thursday at a Democratic fundraising event where he was interviewed by House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.
The New York Times says that Obama's office provided a partial transcript of the event at which Jeffries asked Obama how congressional Democrats should approach AI.
In response, Obama said that once Democrats regain the House majority, they need to put together a framework for a very public conversation.
This is something that is moving very fast in private hands and if we don't get on top of it, I think can be dangerous, obama added, continuing, if we do get on top of it, I do think it's beneficial.
I genuinely think it's going to accelerate, for example, drug development in ways that can help us cure diseases.
In a statement, Jeffries said the former president is correct that decisive action must be taken on artificial intelligence.
Jeffries also said that Republicans have abdicated their responsibility to govern on behalf of the American people.
The New York Times also reports that Obama has offered himself as a sounding board to AI executives and has spoken to both Anthropic CEO Dario Amadei and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
Now, Obama's comments come amidst growing concern around AI safety, particularly after an AI researcher resigned from Anthropic and claimed the leading AI companies are racing straight to self improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.
While on Saturday Amodei outlined a broad approach to pacing the frontier, which would include giving independent safety evaluators access to leading AI companies and models, as well as developing common safety standards between companies.
In social media posts, Altman and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk seemed to respond positively to Amadei's plan, with Altman, saying that OpenAI would also commit to having independent evaluators with employee like access.
