Tesla Inc and Twitter Inc chief executive officer Elon Musk discussed artificial intelligence (AI) issues and electric vehicles with US Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer on Wednesday.
“We talked about the future,” Musk told reporters after leaving the meeting that lasted about an hour. “We talked about AI and the economy.”
Schumer told reporters he had a very good meeting with Musk.
Photo: EPA
“We talked about Buffalo [New York]. Tesla has a large plant in Buffalo. And we talked about AI,” CNN and Politico reported Schumer as saying.
Earlier this month, Schumer, a Democrat, said he had launched an effort to establish rules on AI to address national security and education concerns, as use of programs such as ChatGPT becomes widespread.
Schumer said he had drafted and circulated a “framework that outlines a new regulatory regime that would prevent potentially catastrophic damage to our country, while simultaneously making sure the US advances and leads in this transformative technology.”
In March, Musk and a group of AI experts and industry executives released an open letter calling for a six-month pause in developing systems more powerful than OpenAI’s newly launched GPT-4.
“Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive, and their risks will be manageable,” the letter issued by the Future of Life Institute said.
There is a growing push in Washington for AI regulations.
Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Mark Warner, a Democrat, sent major AI CEOs a letter on Wednesday asking them to address concerns.
US Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo, a Democrat, told reporters on Wednesday that US President Joe Biden’s administration is working “as aggressively as possible to figure out our approach” to AI.
“The challenge is you don’t want to stifle innovation in a brand new area with massive potential,” Raimondo said.
In January, Musk met two top White House officials in Washington to discuss how Tesla and the Biden administration could work to advance electric vehicle production.
Separately, South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol on Wednesday met with Musk in Washington to call for investment in his country, Yoon’s office said.
The two met at Musk’s request, as Yoon is in the US for a six-day state visit, South Korean Vice Minister of Finance Choi Sang-mok told a news conference in Washington on Wednesday.
Yoon touted South Korea as an ideal country for Tesla to build a gigafactory, citing the country’s cutting-edge industrial robots and high-skilled workers, Choi said.
“[Yoon] also said he would actively support Tesla in terms of location, human resources and tax if it makes the investment decision,” Choi said.
Musk told Yoon that South Korea remains one of the top candidates for Tesla’s gigafactories, and he would have an opportunity to visit the Asian country, Choi said.
South Korea is home to two of the world’s biggest automakers, Hyundai Motor Co and Kia Corp, as well as battery makers such as SK On Co and Samsung SDI Co.
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