The Heated Debate Over Who Should Control Access to AI

In May, the CEOs of three of the most prominent AI labs--OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic--signed a statement that warned AI could be as risky to humanity as pandemics and nuclear war. To prevent disaster, many AI companies and researchers are arguing for restrictions on who can access the most powerful AI models and who can develop them in the first place. They worry that bad actors could use AI models to create large amounts of disinformation that could alter the outcomes of elections, and that in the future, more powerful AI models could help launch cyberattacks or create bioweapons. But not all AI companies agree. On Thursday, Meta released Code Llama, a family of AI models built on top of Llama 2, Meta's flagship large language model, with extra training to make them particularly useful for coding tasks.