BERKELEY, California — If the world was going to hash out the biggest policy dilemmas surrounding AI, a converted inn in Berkeley, California seemed as fitting a place as any.
Decoded by POLITICO got an inside look at The Curve, the invite-only conference last weekend that hosted a rare convergence of AI influence and offered a microcosm of the state of current global safety talks. It’s the kind of gathering where Virginia Democratic Rep. Don Beyer asks famed AI pioneer Yoshua Bengio about open-weight models, while attendees muse in the bathroom line on the odds of California Gov. Gavin Newsom calling a special session for AI. (Hint: they are low.)
Other industry luminaries including OpenAI co-founder Wojciech Zaremba, Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark and Google DeepMind’s head of policy Owen Larter roamed the summer-camp-like campus with representatives of both red and blue state governments, Congress, foreign leaders, political groups, civil society, major donors and federal agencies.
Yet for all the expertise assembled, the three-day retreat broke up with the regulatory path forward still decidedly murky, between Congress being on recess and midterm elections approaching that could make the politics around AI even more factional. It highlights the challenges ahead for AI safety advocates now that OpenAI’s Hugging Face hack and other incidents have finally given them the broader public and policymakers’ attention.