"People First" Policy Ideas that Complement Each Other (through better data flow)

Today, OpenAI published a policy paper titled “Industrial policy for the Intelligence Age: Ideas to keep people first” (the announcement is here and the PDF is here). I wanted to briefly document some reactions — I think the range of ideas is quite exciting (this is meant as a “starting point for discussion”) and I think many of the ideas are quite good. I’d love to see many of them taken seriously in the AI industry and the human- and data-centric research communities. I also think these ideas have an exciting data leverage-flavored through-line that I wanted to highlight.

The piece starts by reiterating the value of sharing prosperity broadly while minimizing risks from AI. While folks in the AI space do like to joke about overused adages of this nature (“we should minimize the risks and maximize the benefits!”), I think it’s worth restating. It’s good to state explicit goals and missions, and to keep track of them over time! Then, the piece separates proposals into two categories: things that will build an “open economy” and things that will build a “resilient society”.

The specific sections that I found particularly exciting were:

There’s a lot of other interesting ideas in the document that resonate with long-standing policy ideas that predate “societal AI readiness” discussions, so there will be a lot of past policy work and even some empirical evidence to draw on.

That’s all for this post — I mostly wanted to quickly capture that this is exciting, these ideas can enhance each other in exciting ways, and I hope there is sustained excitement around these kinds of ideas!