Fei-Fei Li: California's SB-1047 AI Bill Will Harm the U.S. AI Ecosystem

Commentary AI ‘The Godmother of AI’ says California’s well-intended AI bill will harm the U.S. ecosystem

 By Fei-Fei Li Fei-Fei Li Down Arrow Button Icon By Fei-Fei Li Fei-Fei Li Down Arrow Button Icon August 6, 2024, 8:30 AM ET Add us on Fei-Fei Li, PhD, is a computer scientist who is widely credited with being the "Godmother of AI."

 Dr. Fei-Fei Li is widely known as the 'Godmother of AI' Courtesy of Dr. Fei-Fei Li Today, AI is more advanced than ever. With great power, though, comes great responsibility. Policymakers, alongside those in civil society and industry, are looking to governance that minimizes potential harm and shapes a safe, human-centered AI-empowered society. I applaud some of these efforts yet caution against others; California’s Safe and Secure Innovation for Frontier Artificial Intelligence Models Act, better known as SB-1047, falls into the latter category. This well-meaning piece of legislation will have significant unintended consequences, not just for California, but for the entire country.  

 

 AI policy must encourage innovation, set appropriate restrictions, and mitigate the implications of those restrictions. Policy that doesn’t will at best fall short of its goals, and at worst lead to dire, if unintended, consequences.

 If passed into law, SB-1047 will harm our budding AI ecosystem, especially the parts of it that are already at a disadvantage to today’s tech giants: the public sector, academia, and “little tech.” SB-1047 will unnecessarily penalize developers, stifle our open-source community, and hamstring academic AI research, all while failing to address the very real issues it was authored to solve. 

 

 First, SB-1047 will unduly punish developers and stifle innovation. In the event of misuse of an AI model, SB-1047 holds liable the party responsible  and  the original developer of that model. It is impossible for each AI developer—particularly budding coders and entrepreneurs—to predict every possible use of their model. SB-1047 will force developers to pull back and act defensively—precisely what we’re trying to avoid. 

 Second, SB-1047 will shackle open-source development. SB-1047 mandates that all models over a certain threshold include a “kill switch,” a mechanism by which the program can be shut down at any time. If developers are concerned that the programs they download and build on will be deleted, they will be much more hesitant to write code and collaborate. This kill switch will devastate the open-source community—the source of countless innovations, not just in AI, but across sectors, ranging from GPS to MRIs to the internet itself.

 Third, SB-1047 will cripple public sector and academic AI research. Open-source development is important in the private sector, but  vital  to academia, which cannot advance without collaboration and access to model data. Take computer science students, who study open-weight AI models. How will we train the next generation of AI leaders if our instit

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