Hanif questions teen witness Wes Friesen on his AI treaty

Councilmember Honey, if you had a question.

I did, and the question is for Wes.

Thanks for being here and testifying.

You said that you were 15.

Yes.

Well, that's very exciting that you spent the entire day.

I saw that you've been waiting.

I'm really grateful that you're engaging on the questions about AI.

Could you just share a little bit more about how you got into this work and what inspired you to put together the AI Treaty?

And is this something that you're also building out at school?

Are you in high school?

Do you go to school in the city?

And is this work that you're doing with your other peers?

Could you speak into the mic and just share a little bit more?

Sorry, you go.

Okay.

Yeah, I try to.

I try to involve other members of my school in this.

What inspired me to work on this is I second what you said, that I could literally die if I don't work on this.

My life is in danger, so that's sort of my huge motivation for why I spend a lot of nights working on this.

I've also written a federal bill, a treaty on this.

I've written other things like, yeah, sure.

Like one thing New York can do on this matter that I've been working on is, like New York City specifically, could involve a bunch of students on this.

And New York could do a Manhattan project on AI safety to have students across New York work on AI safety's technical details to figure out how to make sure AI doesn't kill everyone.

That's what inspires me is that like this is a huge danger to everyone.

So this is incredibly important.

Could you share if at school there's any education on AI systems?

What's happening in your high school on the topic?

At my school, one of my friends runs a club on AI covering these technical details.

It's a huge topic for all the teachers at my school to talk about, oh, are these existential risks?

One of the head people at my school is an expert in U.S.-China foreign policy.

The other day I was having...

some discussion with someone who's more of a China hawk, one of my friends, on

the trade-off with safety versus race with China, which section six of my contract addresses with this really interesting algorithm.

At the school level, what is happening is students are being involved and teachers are talking about it loosely, but there definitely could be like

across this different schools, we could have like a program where as an after school or as homework,

we have students do projects on how do we make sure AI doesn't kill everyone.

Because we have like a million people in the public school system, about only 2,000 people are working on this problem.

Even if only one in a thousand of the students take this seriously, that means a thousand new projects on this.

Which could be super valuable.

I also would encourage the city to do funding for AI safety work.

So far, globally, there's about only $2 billion in funding for this.

And the entire global economy is at stake, so it's worth investing.

A huge amount of money in this, maybe four, like four billion alone could triple it.

I'll also say that like the other ideas that I won't get to, I'll put on my website, aitreaty.base44.app today or tomorrow.

It'll be hopefully, and hopefully all of you guys send it to these AI companies with these very valuable messages of the contract, which could be the thing that solves the problem.

You know, we keep talking about a deal, a treaty.

This is that treaty.

You know, I've spent a lot of time talking to experts about it.

If you have any...

Problems with it, let me know and I'll fix them.

Jeez, I'm sorry.

Oh, and earlier, Julie Menon asked how we could balance safety with China.

Section 6 of the contract addresses that really well.

I think the two...

Did I cover everything?

I think you did.

Just leave your email address with us and your written testimony.

Yeah, this is my card.