Time100/AI 2024
Amba Kak, Co-Executive Director of AI Now listed among Time100’s most influential people in AI in 2024.
Time
Nov 15, 2024
The AI industry is pushing a nuclear power revival — partly to fuel itself
“I want to see innovation in this country,” Myers West said. “I just want the scope of innovation to be determined beyond the incentive structures of these giant companies.”
NBC News
Nov 15, 2024
Women in AI: Sarah Myers West says we should ask, ‘Why build AI at all?’
At many points in my career, I’ve wondered, “Why are we getting locked into this very dystopian vision of the future?” The answer has little to do with the tech itself and a lot to do with public policy and commercialization.
TechCrunch
Nov 15, 2024
How Big Tech is winning the AI talent war
“It is not going to be about who has the best model but who has the best infrastructure and platform-play with access to the consumer,” Kak says. “Inflection and Mistral are the barnacles on the hull of Big Tech.”
Financial Times
Mar 22, 2024
The AI industry is pushing a nuclear power revival — partly to fuel itself
“If you were to integrate large language models, GPT-style models into search engines, it’s going to cost five times as much environmentally as standard search,” said Sarah Myers West, managing director of the AI Now Institute, a research group focused on the social impacts of AI. At current growth rates, some new AI servers could soon gobble up more than 85 terawatt hours of electricity each year, researchers have estimated — more than some small nations’ annual energy consumption.
NBC News
Mar 7, 2024
AI could disrupt the election. Congress is running out of time to respond
Absent congressional action, the task will fall to other government bodies — such as consumer protection agencies and financial regulators — to try to regulate AI under existing laws, said Sarah Myers West, managing director of the AI Now Institute and a former AI advisor to the Federal Trade Commission.
CNN Business
Feb 14, 2024
Op-ed: The Problem With Public-Private Partnerships in AI
Companies first need to do a better job of demonstrating the technology’s societal benefits.
Foreign Policy
Feb 12, 2024
What to know about landmark AI regulations proposed in California
"It's great to see the focus on addressing and mitigating harms before they go into the market," Myers West told ABC News.
ABC News
Feb 10, 2024
How Walmart, Delta, Chevron and Starbucks are using AI to monitor employee messages
“No company is essentially in a position to make any sweeping assurances about the privacy and security of LLMs and these kinds of systems,” Kak said. “There is no one who can tell you with a straight face that these challenges are solved.”
CNBC
Feb 9, 2024
Former FTC AI Advisor Reflects on Tech’s Tricky & Faulty Incentive Structure
"We need to effectively shift the incentive structures to ensure the companies are accountable to the public."
Analytics India
Feb 8, 2024
FTC focused on competition and dominance in generative AI space
Amba Kak, Executive Director of the AI Now Institute, explained that without sufficient funding, smaller companies will not be able to strike deals with third parties for valuable high quality data used to train models, and will be unable to compete with well-funded firms that are able to maximize access to publishers and the media industry and push for exclusivity with respect to data access.
Feb 6, 2024
OpenAI quietly deletes ban on using ChatGPT for “military and warfare”
“Given the use of AI systems in the targeting of civilians in Gaza, it’s a notable moment to make the decision to remove the words ‘military and warfare’ from OpenAI’s permissible use policy,” said Sarah Myers West, managing director of the AI Now Institute and a former AI policy analyst at the Federal Trade Commission.
The Intercept
Jan 12, 2024
EU’s powerful AI Act is here. But is it too late?
AI Now Institute Executive Director Amba Kak spoke positively of the AI Act, telling PopSci it was a “crucial counterpoint in a year that has otherwise largely been a deluge of weak voluntary proposals.”
Popular Science
Dec 12, 2023
Generative AI is transforming businesses everywhere. Big Tech will still be crowned the winner.
In April, researchers at the AI Now Institute published a report that said AI development had been "foundationally reliant" on the resources held and controlled by the giants.
Business Insider
Dec 8, 2023
Make no mistake—AI is owned by Big Tech
If we’re not careful, Microsoft, Amazon, and other large companies will leverage their position to set the policy agenda for AI, as they have in many other sectors.
MIT Tecnology Review
Dec 5, 2023
What the OpenAI drama means for AI progress — and safety
“The push to retain dominance is leading to toxic competition. It’s a race to the bottom,” says Sarah Myers West, managing director of the AI Now Institute, a policy-research organization based in New York City.
Nature
Nov 23, 2023
The AI Supply Chain: An Emerging Oligopoly?
The report was published ahead of a November 15 event hosted by the Open Markets Institute and the AI Now Institute Washington, DC.
Tech Policy Press
Nov 20, 2023
The AI Debate Is Happening in a Cocoon
Existential risks—or x-risks, as they’re sometimes known in AI circles—evoke blockbuster science-fiction movies and play to many people’s deepest fears. But AI already poses economic and physical threats—ones that disproportionately harm society’s most vulnerable people.
The Atlantic
Nov 9, 2023
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