Last month, the SB 1047: Safe and Secure Innovation for Frontier Artificial Intelligence Models Actbillpassed California's state legislature. However, it failed to go over the last obstacle, as Governor Gavin Newsom has decided to veto this antagonistic bill that would have required the development of safeguards for AI models with costs over $100 million that used a computational power of at least 10^26 FLOPS. While opposed by Meta's chief AI scientist Yann LeCun, Google and OpenAI executives, as well as Democratic politicians such as Ro Khanna, this bill was supported by Elon Musk.

Although he signed no less than 17 bills regulating GenAI technology in the last month, Governor Gavin Newsom chose to stop SB 1047, at least in its current state. Regarding the future of AI regulation in California, he said that

We have a responsibility to protect Californians from potentially catastrophic risks of GenAI deployment. We will thoughtfully — and swiftly — work toward a solution that is adaptable to this fast-moving technology and harnesses its potential to advance the public good.

In addition to the above, Newsom said that SB 1047 is "well-intentioned" but fails to take into account the environment where a certain AI solution is deployed, the use of sensitive data, and the kind of decision-making involved. He highlighted the fact that the current form of the bill targets the basics of AI systems, concluding that he does not believe this to be the best approach for keeping the public away from the potential threats of this technology.

Back in August, Nancy Pelosi labeled the California AI bill as "well-intentioned but ill-informed"and was also one of the first to praise Newsom's decision to stop the initiative.

Sooner or later, a new similar bill will come out. However, this time, the legislation will be written down in collaboration with experts such as Fei-Fei Li, Jennifer Tour Chayes, and Tino Cuellar. Those interested in this field can grab Introduction to Generative AI by Numa Dhamani and Maggie Engler off Amazon for $36.99 in Kindle format (thanks to a 26% discount) or can go with the old-school paperback form. In this case, the price is $44.77 (10% off).