President Biden to discuss 'risks and opportunities' of AI with science, tech advisors
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President Joe Biden is slated to meet with his science and technology advisers at the White House on Tuesday, where the discussion will center on the "risks and opportunities" that stem from artificial intelligence amid calls from some in the private sector to pause some of its development.
"The president will discuss the importance of protecting rights and safety to ensure responsible innovation and appropriate safeguards," a White House official said in a statement of Biden's meeting with the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.
The official added that Biden would ask Congress to pass bipartisan legislation to protect children and limit personal data collection by tech companies.
Update: In public statements, President Biden said it "remains to be seen" whether artificial intelligence is dangerous to humanity, adding that tech companies have a responsibility to make sure their products are safe. However, he added the technology has the possibility to help with issues such as disease and climate change.
Several AI-related stocks fell sharply on Tuesday, including declines of more than 18% for C3.ai (AI), SoundHound AI (SOUN) and BigBear.ai Holdings (BBAI).
The meeting comes as some in the private sector, including Tesla (TSLA) CEO and OpenAI co-founder Elon Musk, and Apple (AAPL) co-founder Steve Wozniak, have asked for a pause in certain types of AI development on fears of it becoming too powerful.
"We call on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than [OpenAI's] GPT-4," Musk, Wozniak and others wrote in a recent letter. "This pause should be public and verifiable and include all key actors."
The letter was organized and supported by the Future of Life Institute, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based nonprofit that says its mission is to "reduce global catastrophic and existential risk from powerful technologies."
The institute is led by Max Tegmark, a physics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and it lists Musk as an external adviser.
The normally pro-business friendly U.S. Chamber of Commerce laid out a report last month that called for AI regulation. 
"A failure to regulate AI will harm the economy, potentially diminish individual rights, and constrain the development and introduction of beneficial technologies," the group explained.
The Chamber added that over the next 20 years, "virtually every business and government agency" will use AI, noting that it will have a "profound" impact on society, the economy and national security.

"We must address these issues clearly so that we can shape appropriate responses and achieve our goal, which is to allow the innovation machine to continue to work its magic and improve society, while protecting the basic rights of citizens," the Chamber of Commerce wrote.



Others, including Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) co-founder Bill Gates, have said pausing development of certain AI technology would not solve issues.
"I donât think asking one particular group to pause solves the challenges," Gates said in a recent interview with Reuters. "Clearly thereâs huge benefits to these thingsâ¦ what we need to do is identify the tricky areas."
Artificial intelligence, and in particular, generative artificial intelligence, has become an extraordinarily hot topic in recents months, due in large part to the explosion in use of ChatGPT, which was developed by OpenAI.
After ChatGPT took the world by storm, Microsoft (MSFT) made a significant "multi-year, multi-billion-dollar" partnership with, and investment in OpenAI. It has since started to integrate ChatGPT technology into many of its products, including its Bing search engine.
Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL) unveiled its Bard chatbot in February as a response and recently released it for public use.
Bard is built using Google's artificial intelligence tool known as LaMDA that a former Google engineer claimed last year was sentient. Those claims have since been denied by the company and third-parties and the engineer no longer works at the tech giant.
Last month, OpenAI came out with GPT-4, its latest chatbot update, and claimed the technology could score higher on the SAT exam than 90% of all test takers.
At a recent conference, Nvidia (NVDA) CEO Jensen Huang declared that the "iPhone moment for AI has started."