OpenAI is highly sensitive to regulation which is why they have such a large lobbying team trying to push the US government in their direction. He (a) brings political connections and (b) gives confidence that any advancements won't threaten US national security. It is pretty common amongst enterprise boards.
The reality is that the perceptions of what AI can do is impacting the world far more than what it can actually do.
How do we know these board seats are real and not just rubber stamping everything for the free pay check?
And aside from being NSA director he was Commander of U.S. Cyber Command, experience highly relevant to both OpenAI's security and safety posture, and to selling to government and defense buyers.
So if you were Sam the smart thing to do is to get your platform embedded absolutely everywhere before the heat starts to come out of this iteration of AI.
Source?
Could you elaborate on this? What impact is the perception of what AI can do having? And what impact is it actually having?
A) Copyright. The AI companies are blatantly disregarding practically everyones copyright when they train on all the data they can find online. The rights holders have not given them permission to do so.
B) Privacy. Companies are just taking all the data of their customers and using for training. This is directly in opposition with GDPR, recently established in the Eurozone. Companies, notably Meta, are arguing - oh but AI is so important, that we do not have to ask for users consent.
C) Compute/algorithms. Regulations on "AI" itself. With several actors, notably OpenAI/Altman saying it is so dangerous that only corporations like them can do it responsibly, aiming to do regulatory capture which benefits them.
Large forces from the biggest companies in the world are attempting to change the legal landscape, and manipulate the perception of politicians and the public to ensure sufficient support to get the changes through.