1 Thing in Tech | Intent, 0016

Intent is all about helping talent in tech become more intentional with their career by becoming more informed and more fluent about the goings-on within + around the industry. We welcome your feedback!

Hey there, intentional people!

In the post-election fever, there’s one issue we’re paying attention to more than most…

(PS — before we get to that: don’t forget to sign up for our upcoming Lightning Lesson, How to Ask Questions That Win You Job Offers — where Free Agency CEO, Sherveen, will be talking about how the questions you ask at the end of job interviews can do so much more for you than you might expect — it’s free, & if you can’t make it live, all RSVPs will receive the recording, sign up here!)

The issue of AI regulation is likely the most complicated that the incoming Trump administration will have to wrestle with, and there are a variety of camps to contend with.

Startups and tech companies will be dramatically affected in the short-term. In the mid-to-long-term, we’ll likely be reaching for a more international consensus (by will or by force). We don’t know where it will go, so today, all we want to do is map out the positions of the stakeholders we already know about:

• Outgoing Biden admin: AI executive order mandating safety and privacy protections, pushes gov’t to use AI in national security (source)

• Big tech companies: Amazon, Google, OpenAI, MSFT are just a few of the names pushing Congress to formalize a US AI Safety Institute for responsible development of AI systems (source)

• Safety-oriented AI players: Companies like Anthropic are raising more alarm bells than most re: AI risk and desire for regulation (source) and an ex-OpenAI researcher recently warned re: AGI: “In short, neither OpenAI nor any other frontier lab is ready, and the world is also not ready” (source)

• Venture capitalists: Firms like Founders Fund and a16z, who closely aligned themselves with the Trump campaign over the past year, have pushed on social media for a low-to-no regulation approach to enable innovation above all else (source)

• Incoming Trump/GOP platform: In their 2024 platform, the GOP indicated its intent to repeal the Biden EO and indicated “support... for AI Development rooted in Free Speech and Human Flourishing” (source)

What we don’t know: how much power do the populists within the Trump party have to influence policy? This is where it gets messy. You have Steve Bannon coming out against “unbridled AI” (source), but does he have Trump’s ear more than, say, mega-supporter David Sacks, who sees AI regulation as a threat (source)? Labor-oriented left-wing politicians could join the populist chorus, too, aligning with the Bannons of the world to protect the status of human workers.

And Elon has long been an AI doomer, marking a 20% chance for it to cause humanity’s downfall, but participating in its acceleration along the way (source). Having just paid $44 billion to help Trump secure his latest gig, he might be owed more favors than most.

If you don’t know where it’ll wind up after reading all of that, don’t worry — we can’t tell, either — but we think this is a space worth watching. Let us know what you think!

Sent with Intent,
By Free Agency