As the United States continues its work on developing AI regulations, one industry expert said today that “radical collaboration” between tech companies and policymakers will be crucial to that process.
During a Washington Post Live event today, Hemant Taneja – the CEO and managing director of General Catalyst, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm that made early investments in companies including Stripe and Snap – explained that radical collaboration will lend to responsible AI guidelines.
“It all starts with establishing trust,” Taneja said. “It’s less about regulation and how do we regulate tech, to me, it’s much more about governance, self-regulation, and re-establishing trust.”
“It’s about creating radical collaboration between technology [companies] and D.C. so that we can uphold the spirit of regulation and build companies that have a framework of responsible innovation that they are building with and are sort of creating businesses and scaling them in society in a way that’s in the long-term interest of society,” he added.
Taneja’s company was one of nearly three dozen venture capital firms that signed a set of voluntary commitments for how startups should responsibly develop AI. The group consulted with the Department of Commerce to develop the responsible AI guidelines.
That AI pledge, Taneja said, was just one way for companies to start thinking intentionally about AI regulation and not “jump to it.”
“I think it’s a balance of you know, not regulating too fast, not over-regulating, regulating at the right layers of overall sort of innovation stack, if you will, and we’ve got to let that come to us,” he said. “The only way we can do that while running fast in this is just having that radical collaboration between technology and the policymakers so that we’re learning and bringing everybody along.”
“The more that happens, the more we collaborate with D.C., the more we’re going to create an environment that has a level playing field for startups that enables the adoption of open source technologies carefully in the industry, moves the regulation to the application layer, and frankly, creates companies that are responsible – because that’s ultimately what it takes to be market leaders,” he concluded.
