The President’s Executive Order on Artificial Intelligence is a premature and pessimistic political solution to unknown technical problems and a clear case of regulatory capture at a time when the world would be best served by optimism and innovation1.

This week President Biden released the “Executive Order on the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence” as widely anticipated.

I wanted to offer some thoughts on this because as a technologist, student of innovation, and executive that long experienced the impact of regulation on innovation I feel there is much to consider when seeing such an order and approach to technology innovation. — Read More

The Biden-Harris administration has issued an executive order on artificial intelligence. It is about 20,000 words long and tries to address the entire range of AI benefits and risks. It is likely to shape every aspect of the future of AI, including openness: Will it remain possible to publicly release model weights while complying with the EO’s requirements? How will the EO affect the concentration of power and resources in AI? What about the culture of open research?

We cataloged the space of AI-related policies that might impact openness and grouped them into six categories. The EO includes provisions from all but one of these categories. Notably, it does not include licensing requirements. On balance, the EO seems to be good news for those who favor openness in AI.

But the devil is in the details. We will know more as agencies start implementing the EO. And of course, the EO is far from the only policy initiative worldwide that might affect AI openness. — Read More