Earlier this month, the European Union passed the AI Act, the world’s first major legislation to regulate artificial intelligence.
The law would prohibit employers from using AI to read workers’ emotions, require some AI-generated images and sounds to be labeled as computer-generated, and prohibit high-risk AI systems. requires safety testing.
It was tough to get those rules passed. But isn’t it perhaps more difficult for the EU, the US, or any government trying to regulate AI? Enforcing these rules and making sure that all the nightmare AI scenarios we keep hearing about actually happen? The goal is to find someone who can prevent this from happening.
The newly established European AI Office recently hosted a virtual after-work event for technical talent and is looking to fill dozens of technical roles in the coming months.
The targets include computer scientists, software and data engineers, and hardware experts who help test whether the world’s most advanced AI systems are unbiased or could provide recipes for biological weapons. .
The webinar experienced technical issues and froze twice. Sure, glitches happen to everyone, but maybe not so much in OpenAI recruitment presentations.
Gerald de Graaf, the EU’s senior digital envoy to the US, said people should not read too much into these issues.
“I think it’s probably because the session was oversubscribed, or maybe it’s because of the videoconferencing equipment,” De Graaf said.
He said the perception that governments are not very good at technology is less of an obstacle, at least for Europe.
The major obstacles to attracting the young Stanford and Berkeley graduates he is trying to recruit are clear.
“Money. If you get an offer from an AI company here in Silicon Valley, probably hundreds of thousands of dollars, it’s hard for us to compete with that,” de Graaf said.
Starting salaries for junior-level EU engineers with a master’s degree range from $65,000 to $80,000, De Graaf said, depending on position and experience.
The Googles and Metas of the world can offer so much more, so de Graaf appeals to the heartstrings more than the wallet.
“If you want to have an impact on society, if you want to be able to say to your parents and future children, ‘Look, I was there, I have put AI to good use,’ then do the work.” EU AI “Working in the Department of Safety is a great opportunity,” said De Graaf.
Generative AI is still young, so there really isn’t a huge talent pool for regulators to tap into yet.
“It will be a few years before there is a surplus of labor here,” said Jack Clark, co-founder of AI research firm Anthropic. Clark is also a member of the federal government’s National AI Advisory Council.
The good news, Clark said, is that many AI safety jobs don’t necessarily require a Ph.D. in computer science or mathematics. It’s not so much hacking as the ability to trick machines into doing things they weren’t supposed to do, such as producing biological weapons.
“When testing an AI system, I basically come up with prompts and tests that are mostly written in plain text,” Clark says. “You don’t need very rare elite qualifications.”
If you look at EU or US federal government job postings for AI, you’ll see a lot of technical talent openings.person who is good at computers
Brandi Nonnecke, of the University of California, Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy, said the public sector is in a position where economists and anthropologists can He said we should look for more social scientists.
“You can’t regulate or supervise this technology just from the technical side,” Nonnecke said. A good regulator should be more than just an AI expert. They also need to be people experts.
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