Scaling Laws

Brian Fuller, product policy leader at OpenAI joins Kevin on the challenges of designing policies that ensure AI technologies are safe, aligned, and socially beneficial. From the fast-paced landscape of AI development to the balancing of innovation with ethical responsibility. Tune in to gain insights into the frameworks that guide AI's integration into society and the critical questions that shap...

Renée DiResta, an Associate Research Professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown join Alan Rozenshtein and Kevin Frazier, to take a look at the Trump Administration’s Woke AI policies, as set forth by a recent EO and explored in the AI Action Plan. This episode unpacks the implications of prohibiting AI models that fail to pursue objective truth and espouse "DEI" values. Hosted...

In this episode of Scaling Laws, Kevin Frazier is joined by Sayash Kapoor, co-author of "AI Snake Oil," to explore the complexities of AI development and its societal implications. They delve into the skepticism surrounding AGI claims, the real bottlenecks in AI adoption, and the transformative potential of AI as a general-purpose technology. Kapoor shares insights on the challenges of integrating...

In this episode, join Kevin Frazier as he delves into the complex world of AI regulation with experts Lauren Wagner of the Abundance Institute and Andrew Freedman, Chief Strategy Officer at Fathom. As the AI community eagerly awaits the federal government's AI action plan, our guests explore the current regulatory landscape and the challenges of implementing effective governance with bills like SB...

Janet Egan, Senior Fellow with the Technology and National Security Program at the Center for a New American Security, Jessica Brandt, Senior Fellow for Technology and National Security at the Council on Foreign Relations, Neil Chilson, Head of AI Policy at Abundance Institute, and Tim Fist, Director of Emerging Technology Policy at the Institute for Progress join Kevin Frazier, the AI Innovation...

Lt. Gen. (ret) Jack Shanahan joins Kevin Frazier to explore the nuanced landscape of AI in national security. Challenging the prevalent "AI arms race" narrative. The discussion delves into the complexities of AI integration in defense, the cultural shifts required within the Department of Defense, and the critical role of public trust and shared national vision. Tune in to understand how AI is res...

Kevin Frazier brings Eugene Volokh, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and UCLA law professor, to explore the complexities of libel in the age of AI. Discover how AI-generated content challenges traditional legal frameworks and the implications for platforms under Section 230. This episode is a must-listen for anyone interested in the evolving landscape of AI and law. Hosted on Acast. See a...

Cass Madison, the Executive Director of the Center for Civic Futures, and Zach Boyd, Director of the AI Policy Office at the State of Utah, join Kevin Frazier, AI Innovation and Law Fellow at the University of Texas School of Law and a Senior Editor at Lawfare , to discuss how state governments are adjusting to the Age of AI. This conversation explores Cass's work to organize the increasing number...

In this episode of Scaling Laws, Alan and Kevin discuss the current state of AI growth, focusing on scaling laws, the future of AGI, and the challenges of AI integration into society with Ethan Mollick, Professor of Management at Wharton, specializing in entrepreneurship and innovation. They explore the bottlenecks in AI adoption, particularly the role of interfaces and the uncertainty surrounding...

On the inaugural episode of Scaling Laws, co-hosts Kevin Frazier, AI Innovation and Law Fellow at the University of Texas School of Law and a Senior Editor at Law, and Alan Rozenshtein, Professor at Minnesota Law and Research Director at Lawfare, speak with Adam Thierer, a senior fellow for the Technology and Innovation team at the R Street Institute, and Helen Toner, the Director of Strategy and...

Scaling Laws explores (and occasionally answers) the questions that keep OpenAI’s policy team up at night, the ones that motivate legislators to host hearings on AI and draft new AI bills, and the ones that are top of mind for tech-savvy law and policy students. Alan and Kevin dive into the intersection of AI, innovation policy, and the law through regular interviews with the folks deep in the wee...

Last week the House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a bill that would require ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns the popular social media app TikTok, to divest its ownership in the platform or face TikTok being banned in the United States. Although prospects for the bill in the Senate remain uncertain, President Biden has said he will sign the bill if it comes to his desk, and this...

Today, we’re bringing you an episode of Arbiters of Truth , our series on the information ecosystem. On March 18, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Murthy v. Missouri , concerning the potential First Amendment implications of government outreach to social media platforms—what’s sometimes known as jawboning. The case arrived at the Supreme Court with a somewhat shaky evidentiary record, but...

In May 2023, Montana  passed a new law  that would ban the use of TikTok within the state starting on January 1, 2024. But as of today, TikTok is still legal in the state of Montana—thanks to a preliminary injunction issued by a federal district judge, who found that the Montana law likely violated the First Amendment. In Texas, meanwhile, another federal judge recently upheld a more lim...

In 2021, the Wall Street Journal published a monster scoop: a series of articles about Facebook’s inner workings , which showed that employees within the famously secretive company had raised alarms about potential harms caused by Facebook’s products. Now, Jeff Horwitz, the reporter behind that scoop, has a new book out, titled “ Broken Code ”— which dives even deeper into the documents he uncover...

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably heard a great deal over the last year about generative AI and how it’s going to reshape various aspects of our society. That includes elections. With one year until the 2024 U.S. presidential election, we thought it would be a good time to step back and take a look at how generative AI might and might not make a difference when it comes to th...

Over the course of the last two presidential elections, efforts by social media platforms and independent researchers to prevent falsehoods from spreading about election integrity have become increasingly central to civic health. But the warning signs are flashing as we head into 2024. And platforms are arguably in a worse position to counter falsehoods today than they were in 2020.  How coul...

Today, we’re bringing you an episode of Arbiters of Truth , our series on the information ecosystem. And we’re discussing the hot topic of the moment: artificial intelligence. There are a lot of less-than-informed takes out there about AI and whether it’s going to kill us all—so we’re glad to be able to share an interview that hopefully cuts through some of that noise. Janet Haven is the Executive...

How much influence do social media platforms have on American politics and society? It’s a tough question for researchers to answer—not just because it’s so big, but also because platforms rarely if ever provide all the data that would be needed to address the problem.  A new batch of papers released in the journals Science and Nature marks the latest attempt to tackle this question, with acc...

Earlier this year, Brian Fishman published a fantastic paper with Brookings thinking through how technology platforms grapple with terrorism and extremism, and how any reform to Section 230 must allow those platforms space to continue doing that work. That’s the short description, but the paper is really about so much more—about how the work of content moderation actually takes place, how contempo...

Generative AI products have been tearing up the headlines recently. Among the many issues these products raise is whether or not their outputs are protected by Section 230, the foundational statute that shields websites from liability for third-party content. On this episode of Arbiters of Truth , Lawfare ’s occasional series on the information ecosystem, Lawfare Senior Editor Quinta Jurecic and M...

In 2018, news broke that Facebook had allowed third-party developers—including the controversial data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica—to obtain large quantities of user data in ways that users probably didn’t anticipate. The fallout led to a controversy over whether Cambridge Analytica had in some way swung the 2016 election for Trump (spoiler: it almost certainly didn’t), but it also generated...

If someone lies about you, you can usually sue them for defamation. But what if that someone is ChatGPT? Already in Australia, the mayor of a town outside Melbourne has threatened to sue OpenAI because ChatGPT falsely named him a guilty party in a bribery scandal. Could that happen in America? Does our libel law allow that? What does it even mean for a large language model to act with "malice"? Do...

Over the past few years, TikTok has become a uniquely polarizing social media platform. On the one hand, millions of users, especially those in their teens and twenties, love the app. On the other hand, the government is concerned that TikTok's vulnerability to pressure from the Chinese Communist Party makes it a serious national security threat. There's even talk of banning the app altogether. Bu...

On the latest episode of Arbiters of Truth , Lawfare 's series on the information ecosystem, Quinta Jurecic and Alan Rozenshtein spoke with Ravi Iyer, the Managing Director of the  Psychology of Technology Institute  at the University of Southern California's Neely Center. Earlier in his career, Ravi held a number of positions at Meta, where he worked to make Facebook's al...