On June 20, TIME magazine came out with an exclusive report stating that OpenAI convinced the European Union to water down its Artificial Intelligence Act which was adopted on June 14. The report mentioned how OpenAI sent a White Paper to the EU Commission and Council in September 2022, which mentioned that the AI Act should not consider its general-purpose AI systems (like GPT-3 and DALL-E) a part of its high-risk category. Why it matters: As we have previously reported, OpenAI has been a major proponent of AI regulation. The company’s CEO, Sam Altman, participated in the US Subcommittee hearing on the oversight of artificial intelligence, where he agreed that AI systems should be put through independent testing and should not have safe harbour protections. He was also one of the AI experts to say that AI poses a risk of extinction to humanity and that mitigating this risk should be a top priority. Most industries don’t want regulations, and thus OpenAI’s eagerness for regulation did raise some doubts. TIME’s report tells us that while OpenAI wants regulation for AI, it doesn’t want its own AI products to comply with these regulations. What did the White Paper say? The paper highlights that while general-purpose Al systems like OpenAI’s GPT-3 can be used for a wide range of use cases, including high-risk ones (which at the time were covered under the AI Act), the company ensures oversight over the use of its AI systems through an application programming interface (API). This API allows them to review…
