Ahmed and Hsu discuss validator funding and broad expertise
Imran Ahmed raises the dirty secret that civil society research is often funded by platforms, and calls for public funding. Jukay Hsu argues many parties can play a role and that power will be dispersed beyond frontier labs, which complicates expert reliance.
If I can make a brief point on who could do this work, being realistic,
To date, civil society studying social media and AI platforms has had one dirty secret, that most of its funding has come from the platforms themselves.
So Meta and Google were enormous funders of extremism research, of safety research on their own platforms.
And when I would meet, and we don't take their money, when I would meet with their CEOs, they would say, the CEOs of the civil society bodies which were funded by them, they'd say, we're not allowed to say that they haven't done enough.
We can always say they could do more, but not they haven't done enough.
So there are real compromises there.
In Europe or the rest of the world, and you can hear from my accent that I actually grew up in Britain, that the government would fund this.
And when it comes to giving a body the resources to have the speed and creativity to be effective in dealing with the fastest moving technology
in human history, I cannot think of a non-governmental source of funding that would be sufficient to get it to scale fast enough.
So the question for New York City and New York State, which is a substantial economic unit, the budget of New York State is one quarter that of the entire United Kingdom, one state alone.
It does have the economic capacity to do so, and I think you would have to seriously think about whether or not you're willing to put some public money towards creating an institution that's able to operate with the speed, resources, and creativity to be effective.