White House to Meet with Top AI Companies

The White House will meet with four top American artificial intelligence (AI) companies today, in what administration officials said would be a “frank” discussion about the current and near-term risks from technologies like ChatGPT.

Vice President Kamala Harris, along with other senior officials, will meet with the CEOs of Alphabet (GOOG), Anthropic, Microsoft (MSFT), and ChatGPT-maker OpenAI. The meeting's focus will be how to mitigate the potential risks that generative AI applications, like the text-creating ChatGPT, can pose to society, security and the economy, said Arati Prabhakar, Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy. Officials will emphasize the role and responsibility that these companies will bear in helping prevent these risks. 

“The breadth of these applications affect so many aspects of Americans' lives,” Prabhakar said. Google and Microsoft are integrating AI-driven features, and many investors are jumping on the AI bandwagon. On the other hand, AI technology may also cause changes to the nature of jobs.

The meeting is part of a broader effort by the White House to address AI developments, which have also included a February Executive Order from President Joe Biden that directed federal agencies to weed out bias in new technology use like AI.

The White House will announce that several AI companies will participate in a public evaluation of their products at a major developers conference in August, which will be the first major public review of several large language models. Administration officials also said that the Office of Management and Budget will release guidance for federal workers on how to integrate AI tools into their work. 

In another step, the administration will unveil $140 million of funding to set up seven new National Science Foundation research institutes devoted to AI research and development.