"Fragmentation" in AI Regulation & Sentiment Creates Headwinds for Tech Trade

Nicole (0:00)

Tech and business analysts, at least in Martin Media, is with me.

So much urgency is evident now with AI, rules, regulations, rogue agents that people don't even realize have gone rogue for a time. Tell me a little bit about why we have this urgency. What are we seeing here, the trends?

Lisa Martin (0:20)

Hey Nicole, it's great to be with you. Thanks for having me. So AI, non-shock. It's at another inflection point, right? We're moving from these systems that can answer questions for us, but now they can do things for us, right? More actions. They're also getting more and more access to data and software and networks. We're seeing right now this confluence of a lot of things going on, which makes it even more interesting. Washington's moving. The president said that he's going to create an AI force and appoint an AI czar. Those are concepts right now. We do know he met privately with Dario Ambede last night, who's one of the strongest voices pushing for greater safeguards, but the AI czar authority. I'm very curious about this, Nicole, because it's still undefined. But the question remains, well, who establishes the baseline while still allowing US companies to innovate, to compete, and there's a collision also happening right now. We've got capability, autonomy, geopolitical competition.

We're scaling AI faster than what we're doing in terms of establishing accountability for it so that urgency rises to the top.

Nicole (1:26)

And look, we know that these hyperscalers are spending a lot. There's a lot that's going on. In fact, I read that Dario Amadei and also Mark Zuckerberg were going to be going to the White House for a conversation about AI, which is interesting because they had a little bit of differing views, right? We had Dario Amadei on one side and Sam Altman and Elon Musk, and then on the other side, right?

It was split up on which one, Jensen Wong was on the other side talking about the AI agents and all that. So at this point now, does the regulation help? A lot of folks, for example, were waiting on regulation on Bitcoin. The more they get, it's easier for them to then navigate. They know what they can and cannot do. Does that actually help in some way? What kind of regulation do you expect or does it slow the innovation or both?

Lisa Martin (2:15)

That's been my question, Nicole, about does it slow the integration? I think if it's regulated poorly, then yeah, it could slow innovation. But my biggest concern right now is this fragmentation. Because if we have different countries, they're all going to go on AI differently, and I don't think, one, that's a problem, and two, there's much we can do about it. I think the problem is for the Anthropics, the OpenAI, the NVIDIAs, where those requirements don't work together, and these AI companies then get forced into this patchwork to start engineering around different regulations because that, like I said, that's going to impact the speed of regulation. At the same time, I don't think it's practical that one global rulebook can happen. So I say, what about major AI producing countries working together, is that possible, towards maybe compatible, like a base, like minimum outcomes, that common denominator around the things like security, incident reporting that we're seeing more of, then once that common denominator is there, let the companies across countries compete on how will they meet those outcomes.

Nicole (3:17)

What did you think today of NVIDIA's news about the OpenAgent safety platform that they were working on, and Jensen Wong saying, this is a solvable problem. It seems like a mountain last week, and suddenly, it's, and also OpenAI saying, look, we're going to shut down the lab of the, or sort of pull in those advanced AI agents.

How come it's so solvable this week, and last week it felt like it was the end of humanity?

Lisa Martin (3:49)

Right.

And we even have Bill Gates commenting on that yesterday on Meet the Press. My concern is the narrative, I mentioned fragmentation and regulations, the narrative is incredibly fragmented. We have some on one side, Jensen talking about the fear mongering. They were all at Dreamforce here in Silicon Valley a couple of weeks ago.

We've got them saying, we're going to keep the foot pedal to the metal, the administration saying the same thing. Then we have some who are really, really close to the actual AI models, the Anthropics, the Sam Altmans, for example, saying, hold on, this is why we should pause. What concerns me most is that that narrative not only is it fragmented, the fear-mongering among citizens, which have to have a stick in the game here, is huge. No wonder people don't trust this.