Does AI need an antitrust exemption so it doesn't kill everyone????
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Hogging seats on a crowded train, not saying excuse me, watching videos on your phone with no headphones in. Sometimes it feels like we don't know how to act anymore. What we have been seeing, increasingly, is people breaking rules. Why should I play by the rules if nobody else is going to do that for me? This week on Explain It to Me, how to mind your manners.
New episodes Sundays wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neil Apattel, editor in chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. The biggest story in tech right now is the spiraling debate about AI safety and regulation. Researchers at the big AI labs, including Anthropic and Google Deepmind, have recently quit in noisy ways, saying the models those companies are developing pose real threats, and safety isn't being taken seriously across the industry.
Other researchers have agreed, saying the chances of AI killing us all is greater than 10%, and the CEOs of all these companies have issued various calls to slow down development and develop regulation, including asking for antitrust exemptions so they can all coordinate on safety issues. That is a lot of ideas, and I've been especially curious about the ask for an antitrust exemption, which has led to accusations that these companies are seeking regulatory capture. attempting to form a cartel and even somehow find a way out from investor pressure ahead of their IPOs. So to make sense of it all, I called Jonathan Cantor, the former antitrust chief of the United States Department of Justice under the Biden administration. These days he is both a professor of law at Wash U and a professor of technology policy at Carnegie Mellon.
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