Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news.
Speaker 2: President Trump signed an executive order aimed at limiting state
Speaker 2: level regulation of AI. The move is supported by tech
Speaker 2: leaders who have argued local rules could stifle innovation. We're
Speaker 2: joined by David Sachs, the White House AI and Crypto
Speaker 2: zah Or, Senior Advisor, and David, I think it is
Speaker 2: a really good place to start in your work with
Speaker 2: the President in consulting and advising on the formulation of
Speaker 2: this executive order. What was the problem that you were
Speaker 2: trying to solve for and what is it that you
Speaker 2: said to the President about why this EO was the
Speaker 2: right approach to focus on state level laws?
Speaker 3: Well, thanks for having me.
Speaker 4: The problem that we see is that you've got one
Speaker 4: thousand different bills going through state legislatures right now to
Speaker 4: regulate AI, and over one hundred measures already passed. Some
Speaker 4: of these bills are country victory, and you've got fifty
Speaker 4: different states running in fifty different directions.
Speaker 3: That type of compliance.
Speaker 4: Regime is going to be very hard for small companies
Speaker 4: and startups, especially innovators, to comply with. And so what
Speaker 4: we need is a single federal or national framework for
Speaker 4: AI regulation and that's what the President has supported, and
Speaker 4: by the way, he supported this for a long time.
Speaker 4: If you go back to his July speech on AI
Speaker 4: he called for a single national framework then. And what
Speaker 4: we've done with the SEO now is to make clear
Speaker 4: that is the administration's policy and to task members of
Speaker 4: the administration to work with Congress to try and enact
Speaker 4: that framework through legislation, because ultimately this needs to be
Speaker 4: a law, and in the meantime create tools that the
Speaker 4: administration can use to push back on examples of the
Speaker 4: most onerous and excessive state regulations.
Speaker 2: David, there is of course some pushback you know, on
Speaker 2: the executive order from the states themselves, from other Republicans,
Speaker 2: you know, as you know, like I studied the July
Speaker 2: speech and strategy closely, a big part of it, you know,
Speaker 2: was infrastructure related and about deregulation. The concern about this
Speaker 2: latest executive order is that while it addresses your concerns
Speaker 2: about many different pieces of state regulation, it does not
Speaker 2: provide for a single federal framework.
Speaker 4: Well, at the end of the day, that single federal
Speaker 4: framework has be enacted through law, and we need Congress
Speaker 4: to do that. And so the President has asked Congress
Speaker 4: to do that, and these task members of the administration
Speaker 4: to work with Congress to produce that framework. In the meantime,
Speaker 4: what we've done here is articulated set of principles. We
Speaker 4: said what values are important to us. We said that
Speaker 4: we want to protect child safety, that's important. We want
Speaker 4: to respect copyright, we want to preserve the ability of
Speaker 4: local communities to choose what infrastructures and their communities. We're
Speaker 4: not seeking to preempt the states in any of those areas.
Speaker 4: So this is an important set of principles that we
Speaker 4: have put forth. And at the same time, the EO
Speaker 4: provides for a number of tools that can be used
Speaker 4: to push back on excessive state regulation. And let me
Speaker 4: just illustrate why I think this is so necessary. What
Speaker 4: we're really talking about here is regulation of AI models
Speaker 4: and algorithms. Well, think about how an AI model is developed.
Speaker 4: You can have developers in one state of multiple states
Speaker 4: writing the code. It can then be trained in a
Speaker 4: data center in another state. You then can have inference
Speaker 4: happen in another state, and the entire service is provided
Speaker 4: over the Internet using national telecommunications infrastructure. So you're dealing
Speaker 4: there with at least four different states and all of
Speaker 4: them can lay claim to regulating those AI models, and
Speaker 4: those regulations can be in contradiction with each other. Even
Speaker 4: Democrat governors have admitted this as a problem. So just
Speaker 4: the other day, Kathy hoklel the governor of New York
Speaker 4: It basically said that she might prefer to enact California's
Speaker 4: SB fifty three, which is a regulation that they just
Speaker 4: passed in California, rather than the bill that her own
Speaker 4: assembly gave her, the Raise Act, because she sees that, wait,
Speaker 4: do we really want to create this patchwork in different regulations.
Speaker 4: So even democratic governors are realizing this is a problem,
Speaker 4: and if they all run in different directions, then we're
Speaker 4: going to end up with a patchwork or a mismash
Speaker 4: of regulations that are impossible for companies to comply with.
Speaker 4: What the President is calling for here is just common sense.
Speaker 4: We want to get to a single national framework of
Speaker 4: compliance as opposed to fifty states running in different directions.
Speaker 1: Meanwhile, Kathy Hokle actually is getting a bit of criticism,
Speaker 1: perhaps for narrowing and what some are saying is bowing
Speaker 1: down to business. David, I'm really interested in how you
Speaker 1: oppose that view, because there is anxiety in the population,
Speaker 1: AI versus jobs, AI versus energy bills. How are you
Speaker 1: giving them the sense that we haven't seen federal government
Speaker 1: and indeed now state governments just handing over the reins
Speaker 1: to big tech billionaires as people call them.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 4: No, I understand there's a lot of fear out there
Speaker 4: about AI and job los specifically, and a lot of
Speaker 4: those fears have been drummed up. Let me just say
Speaker 4: on the job loss question, because I think this is
Speaker 4: really important that Yale just released a study and it
Speaker 4: showed that in the thirty three months after the launch
Speaker 4: of chat GPT, there was no discernible disruption to the
Speaker 4: US job market none. They said, no discernible disruption. And
Speaker 4: in fact, if you look right now, more jobs are
Speaker 4: being created than being lost. So this whole idea of
Speaker 4: job losses just isn't true. There was an article on
Speaker 4: the Wall Street Journal just last week talking about the
Speaker 4: construction boom that's happening that's benefiting construction workers like electricians,
Speaker 4: like plumbers, like workers who pour concrete or hang drywall.
Speaker 3: Their wages are up thirty percent.
Speaker 4: Because this infrastructure boom that's happening right now, and there's
Speaker 4: actually a job shortage in many of those trades, meaning
Speaker 4: we need more workers going into those trades. So what
Speaker 4: we're seeing right now is an overall AI boom that's
Speaker 4: benefiting the economy. You know, the GDP growth rate was
Speaker 4: tracking about four percent, and half of that up to
Speaker 4: half of it's been attributed to AI. So I just
Speaker 4: think that this narrow about job loss has been blown
Speaker 4: out of proportion. Certainly there could be job displacement in
Speaker 4: the future, but we haven't seen any of that so far.
Speaker 3: It's been quite the opposite. It has been job gains.
Speaker 2: David final one on the EO, if I may, you
Speaker 2: know what this EO allows for. Is it the sort
Speaker 2: of hope that it will lead to the DOJ sewing
Speaker 2: states like New York and California. And if that's the case,
Speaker 2: you know the President and the administration's confidence that you'd
Speaker 2: win them.
Speaker 4: Well, that is one of the tools that is in
Speaker 4: the EO is that the DOJ has been tasked to
Speaker 4: form a litigation task Force that would have the ability
Speaker 4: to push back on excessively burn some state laws, laws
Speaker 4: that may be unconstitutional, violate the First Amendment, things like that.
Speaker 4: By the way, the DOJ already had that power, so
Speaker 4: this is not a novel power. But what's being done
Speaker 4: here in the CEO is we're marshaling all the resources
Speaker 4: of the federal government behind the strategy of the President
Speaker 4: to create a national framework. Now, in terms of what
Speaker 4: laws would go after, that's a decision that has been made.
Speaker 4: We haven't decided whether California and New York should be
Speaker 4: targets in that way. The one that I think is
Speaker 4: probably the most successive is this Colorado law that seeks
Speaker 4: to prohibit algorithmic discrimination. What that basically says is that
Speaker 4: if an AI model has a disparate impact on a
Speaker 4: protected group, then that model is violating the law. Model developers,
Speaker 4: by the way, I have no idea how to comply
Speaker 4: with this because they're not aware of all the downstream
Speaker 4: uses of their model. I mean, if a business decides
Speaker 4: to use an AI model in a hiring decision, for example,
Speaker 4: that business is already on the hook for discrimination. So
Speaker 4: how would the model developer know that it was being
Speaker 4: used in that way? But what Colorado was trying to
Speaker 4: do there is get their ideology inserted into the model.
Speaker 3: That's very concerning to us.
Speaker 4: We think there's a first amendment issue there, But look,
Speaker 4: we haven't made any decisions in terms of how that
Speaker 4: litigation task for US to be used.
Speaker 1: David Briefly, all of this is set in the context
Speaker 1: of US versus China and a deemed to run forward
Speaker 1: on AI development. Meanwhile, a busy week and eight two
Speaker 1: hundreds might indeed be able to get to China. How
Speaker 1: many do you think you'll do in volumes and what
Speaker 1: do you think the appetite is of China to buy
Speaker 1: in videos more sophisticated chips.
Speaker 3: Well, it's interesting.
Speaker 4: I just saw an article that said that China was
Speaker 4: rejecting the H two hundred, So apparently they don't want them,
Speaker 4: and I think the reason for that is they want
Speaker 4: semiconductor independence. The same way that the United States wanted
Speaker 4: to be energy independent. They want to be semiconductor independent.
Speaker 4: So they're rejecting our chips. And that's part of the
Speaker 4: calculation that goes into the decision of what we authorized
Speaker 4: to be sold to China. The US policy has always
Speaker 4: been that we don't allow the leading edge chips, and
Speaker 4: we're not.
Speaker 3: This is this H two hundred chip.
Speaker 4: It was state of the art a couple of years ago,
Speaker 4: but now it's been superseded by the new or Blackwell
Speaker 4: architecture and the Ruben architecture that's coming out next year.
Speaker 4: So this is now a lagging chip, not a leading chip.
Speaker 4: But what you see is China is not taking them
Speaker 4: because they want to prop up and subsidize Wilwey.
Speaker 3: They want to create a national champion.
Speaker 4: And that was part of our calculation of selling not
Speaker 4: the best but lagging chips tochch is you can take
Speaker 4: market share away from Walwig. But I think the Chinese
Speaker 4: government's figured that out and that's why they're not allowing them.
Speaker 1: David Sachs, we always wish we had more time White House,
Speaker 1: AI and cryptos Are We thank you for joining us
Speaker 1: today on the executive Order