Elon Musk, the boss of Twitter, Tesla and SpaceX, said Monday he spoke to senior Chinese politicians about the need to regulate artificial intelligence (AI) during his trip to China last week.
“We’ve had very productive discussions about the risks of AI and the need for oversight or regulation,” he said in a live Twitter chat with candidate Robert Kennedy Jr. — the slim odds — of the Democratic nomination against Joe Biden.
“What I take away from these talks is that China will introduce AI regulations in China.”
According to state media reports, President Xi Jinping and other leaders at a Chinese Communist Party summit last Wednesday agreed to “improve monitoring of network data and artificial intelligence.”
Chinese authorities announced in April that they would impose a “security review” on Chinese-developed AI-based tools like ChatGPT. Content generated by artificial intelligence must “reflect fundamental socialist values and must not contain (elements related to) the subversion of state power”.
The draft regulations, which are likely to come into force in China’s highly centralized political system, were unveiled as many Chinese tech companies such as Baidu, Alibaba, JD.com and ByteDance (parent company of TikTok) recently announced they are working on their own so-called “generatives “ AI model hoping to follow the success of the American pioneer ChatGPT.
Developed by California’s OpenAI, this program is generating excitement around the world, but also concerns about its ability to produce all kinds of coherent text and the opacity of the underlying language model.
Elon Musk spent two days in China without tweeting. This visit by one of the richest men in the world is controversial due to the political and trade tensions between the United States and China.
The multi-billionaire also sparked controversy when he suggested Beijing’s claimed island of Taiwan should belong to China.
He was greeted at almost the same level as a foreign political leader, met with several government officials, and he “praised China’s vitality and development potential,” according to the Foreign Ministry Qin Gang.
“I pointed out that the development of extremely powerful digital superintelligence in China would pose a risk to the Chinese government’s sovereignty,” he said Monday. “And I think they take that risk seriously.”