Sternly Worded

So nine Democrats, from both the House of Representatives and the Senate, have sent a letter to Google:

Citing MIT Technology Review’s coverage, the letter raises three issues: the potential for bias in large language models, the growing corporate influence over AI research, and Google’s lack of diversity.

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These are three worthwhile issues. But I don't understand why Congressional Democrats are asking Google to answer for them. Actually, maybe I do. Perhaps what's going on here is one of the standard problems that governmental bodies have; doing things out of the public eye means that the public doesn't see them. Obvious, I know, but a problem nonetheless, as very public positions, like member of Congress, tend to need a certain amount of visibility. And so a public dressing down of Google is being performed, when there very well might be more effective means of addressing the points raised.

If there is actually an understanding of what an unbiased large language model would look like, the federal government could simply not allow its money to be used to purchase them. The potential shrinking of the potential customer base would prompt Google, and likely everyone else in the business, to make sure that their models adhered to the standard for lack of bias.

Likewise, the government could look to non-corporate sources, such as universities, for it's own artificial intelligence needs. Again this would prompt, not just Google, but the industry as a whole, to look for partners in government and academia to share in the research duties.

Forcing diversity is likely a bit more difficult, as this speaks to how businesses hire, and would smack of affirmative action, which tends to spark pointless fights. But this isn't to say that nothing can be done. If we understand a lack of diversity, or more accurately, disparities in hiring patterns, are the result of opportunity hoarding, ways to stimulate the economy to grow more jobs would likely make a dent in things. Personally, my go-to in this would be a relaxation of intellectual property laws, but that's unlikely to happen anytime soon.

I suspect that these would all be more effective than potentially grilling Google in a hearing. They're also all much less certain, since the nine Representatives and Senators can write letters without needing anyone else to support them in it. So I get it. But it doesn't seem to really solve the problem at hand, which is kind of a shame.