Musk, Zuckerberg, Gates to join US senators for AI forum

Washington: The U.S. Senate's top Democrat is bringing U.S. technology leaders including Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai to Capitol Hill on Wednesday for a closed-door forum on how Congress should set artificial intelligence safeguards.

"For Congress to legislate on artificial intelligence is for us to engage in one of the most complex and important subjects Congress has ever faced," Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said on Tuesday.

Lawmakers are grappling with how to mitigate the dangers of the emerging technology, which has experienced a boom in investment and consumer popularity after the release of OpenAI's ChatGPT.

Lawmakers want safeguards against potentially dangerous deepfakes, election interference and attacks on critical infrastructure.

Other expected attendees include feature OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna, former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates, AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler and Senators Mike Rounds, Martin Heinrich, and Todd Young.

Schumer, who talked AI with Musk in April, wants attendees to talk "about why Congress must act, what questions to ask, and how to build a consensus for safe innovation." Sessions begin at 10 a.m. ET and are to last until 5 p.m. ET.

In March, Musk and a group of AI experts and executives called for a six-month pause in developing systems more powerful than OpenAI's GPT-4, citing potential risks to society.