Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg will see each other much sooner than expected. While much of the world is awaiting news about the historic cage match between the two, the entrepreneurs have been summoned to the United States Senate to attend the forum on artificial intelligence (AI).
The announcement was made by a spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. He said both Musk and Zuckerberg will meet with Schumer on Capitol Hill to discuss ways to regulate AI. They won't be the only ones. The meeting will also be attended by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Sundar Pichai of Alphabet (Google), Sam Altma from OpenAI and NVIDIA's Jensen Huang. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt will also attend.
All of them have strong links to artificial intelligence. For example, SpaceX, X and Tesla CEO Elon Musk is also a co-founder as well as a major shareholder of OpenAI, the parent company of ChatGPT. Zuckerberg continues to be the CEO of Meta, the parent company of Facebook, a social network that has been experimenting with the Metaverse and also uses artificial intelligence. Google was one of the first to develop these systems, and NVIDIA, reports El Periódico, devotes much of its business to creating "the semiconductors necessary to support this technology."
Is it necessary to regulate AI?
This appointment is the first of three meetings that Schumer will hold with tech moguls regarding regulation for artificial intelligence. The Democrat's idea is to create legislation on this technological advancement before the end of the year. In statements picked up by NBC in June, Schumer said it is necessary to legislate the use of this technology:
We have no choice but to acknowledge that AI’s changes are coming and in many cases are already here. We ignore them at our own peril. Many want to ignore AI because it’s so complex. But when it comes to AI, we cannot be ostriches sticking our heads in the sand.
Senate Minority Leader John Thune does not agree with Schumer. The Republican senator from South Dakota said this summer that there are many people researching artificial intelligence and that it is necessary to let them continue their work before regulating the use of AI:
You’ve got a lot of folks who have been putting the time in to learn the subject, doing a lot of outreach to the stakeholder community, kind of synthesizing the best ideas. And to me, that’s a process that you ought to let work. And if you want to accelerate it, that’s fine, But I don’t know that creating a parallel system is the right way to do this. I think the committees want to work. This is in their wheelhouse. Let them produce the results.
