The Republican party wasn’t the only loser following a historic Democratic victory following this year’s midterm elections. Big Tech suffered a bruising defeat as well, with dozens of ballot measures across the country calling for more restrictions on data centers, along with a rash of newly-minted elected officials who campaigned on holding the industry accountable.
It was one of the clearest rebukes of AI yet, demonstrating how frustrated the American people have become as they’ve watched an elite group of tech billionaires amass unprecedented power, influence, and wealth — while explicitly threatening the job market and even human survival.
For tech leaders who have chosen to kiss the ring in an undignified race to cozy up to Trump, it’s an awkward reality check. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who has spent years by the president’s side and secretly met with him at a GOP convention, is seemingly struggling to make sense of the news.
In an awkwardly-worded and difficult-to-parse tweet, Altman mused that “people should always be in control of the future.”
“OpenAI is against the notion that it would be acceptable for people to be relegated to a role of doing things that ‘AI systems think makes sense to reward in humans,’” he wrote. “People should not cede control of the future to superintelligence, and that requirement should ultimately constrain AI progress.”
The subject of an AI slowdown has been a major litmus test of the federal government’s willingness to intervene and establish a set of rules for the industry. While many critics have called for more regulations, Trump and his cabinet have ridiculed the idea, instead instructing companies to regulate themselves despite enormous perceived risks.
Altman’s latest tweet — which he shared hours into a massive Democratic sweep of Congress on Tuesday night — appears to be an early attempt to reach across the aisle and build a relationship with a political party he’s largely ignored in his quest to ingratiate himself with Trump.
The ChatGPT maker has already been busy readying a policy offensive, including a likely misguided attempt to rename data centers to “AI compute campuses,” and a call for “speed limits” for the most advanced AI systems.
Whether these efforts will pay off remains dubious at best. The election results couldn’t have sent a clearer message, indicating just how much good will Silicon Valley has lost. It’s a fundamentally broken relationship that could take years to mend.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, one of the loudest voices in the calls for more regulatory oversight, has yet to comment on the outcome of the elections.
More on the elections: Elon Musk in Real Trouble After Humiliating Defeat
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