• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, May 10, 2023

The head of artificial intelligence company OpenAI, Sam Altman, will testify next Tuesday at a Senate subcommittee hearing that could mark the first step toward regulating the new technology.

“Artificial intelligence urgently needs rules and safeguards to address its immense promise and pitfalls,” Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut) stated Wednesday when announcing the upcoming oversight hearing.

He said next week's hearing, to be held by the Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law, begins the process of “overseeing and illuminating” artificial intelligence's algorithms and technology.

Senator Josh Hawley (R-Missouri), added that artificial intelligence “will be transformative in ways we can't even imagine, with implications for Americans' elections, jobs, and security.”

The hearing comes as policy makers are increasingly scrutinizing artificial intelligence.

Last week, White House officials warned of the technology's potential dangers, and Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan called for new regulations.

While several companies are developing artificial intelligence, Open AI has attracted a great deal of recent attention due to its large language model software known as GPT-4, which was commercially released in March.

That same month, dozens of prominent technology executives including Twitter CEO Elon Musk urged developers to voluntarily suspend efforts to create technology more powerful than GPT-4. At around the same time, the advocacy group Center for AI and Digital Policy urged the FTC to halt further commercial releases of GPT-4, arguing the technology “is biased, deceptive, and a risk to privacy and public safety.”

Other witnesses expected to testify Tuesday include New York University professor emeritus Gary Marcus, who founded the machine learning company Geometric Intelligence, and IBM vice president Christina Montgomery.