U.S. Rep. Barry Moore (R-Enterprise) thinks President Donald Trump is correct when it comes to the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the country.
The concern over AI safety has grown since July, when OpenAI unleashed an experimental artificial intelligence model that, without reasonable controls or oversight, gained unauthorized access to several computer networks, which culminated in a days-long hack on another AI company. This has caused some leaders in the industry and Congress to call for new regulations to be implemented for the technology.
The breach resulted in Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall issuing a subpoena demanding that OpenAI, led by Sam Altman, respond to an investigation into the company’s complete lack of oversight and adequate safeguards in the hacking of Hugging Face, another artificial intelligence (AI) company.
President Donald Trump believes most of the warnings are overblown and said he doesn’t want to slow down development of new AI models and lose the race to China.
Moore, who is also the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate, discussed the issue recently on WVNN’s “The Yaffee Program.”
“I think the president is right in his approach that we cannot let China get upper hand because the learning curve on that thing, the technology, the advancements, it’s almost straight up,” Moore explained. “In other words, whoever has the lead, it’s hard to catch up.”
The congressman said the key concern will be how to expand America’s energy grid because China has already been working on growing their own energy capacity.
“As we look at China, and they didn’t put guardrails on what they’re doing, and you know they were building coal, clean coal plants in China. They were bringing them online once a month on average. We were shutting everything down,” he said. “And so when we look at China compute wise, we’re probably ahead of them. Energy wise they may be four times ahead of us by the next decade, and so they brought energy online.”
“So we were sort of slowing our energy protection regulations,” he added. “You know, even drilling here. I mean, there was so much going on, killing the coal-fired plants…We didn’t want nuclear…and so there were so many things that put us at a disadvantage. We’ve got to make sure we’re looking at the future and how we position ourselves.”
Moore thinks there is still a role for the government to play, as long as it continues to allow AI to flourish.
“We can put guardrails on it in some way to make sure that we know what AI is doing,” he said. “We sit down with the experts, those of us here who are making those decisions, but at the same time, we don’t need to hinder the development of technology that will certainly be at play in the next few years and is moving rapidly. So, I think it’s it’s an issue we’ve got worked through. I think we have to have people at the table, certainly local leaders, community leaders, and certainly the the people in D.C. as well to make sure that as America we understand what we’ve got to do, and that we don’t fall behind.”
Moore also admitted that some of the doomsday scenarios might be overblown and he doesn’t believe it’s going to destroy humanity.
“I think it is a little hyperbolic,” he argued. “Again, we got to get experts up here because there are people that are saying they’re concerned about that. I don’t know that I necessarily buy into that 100%. You know, I think that certainly, like I said, we need guardrails. We need to watch what we’re doing, and it is a technology that’s advancing so fast and it’s moving so fast.”
Yaffee is a contributing writer to Yellowhammer News and hosts “The Yaffee Program” weekdays 9-11 a.m. on WVNN. You can follow him on X @Yaffee.
