Amba Kak

In the spring of 2023, as ChatGPT was becoming the fastest-growing consumer application in history, Amba Kak was skeptical of the AI revolution. Rather than marking a paradigm shift in the power of Silicon Valley, she believed, AI would further consolidate it in the hands of a few Big Tech firms. The AI Now Institute, where Kak is co-executive director, has dedicated itself to studying the consequences of that power.

“We were like ‘look, we get the excitement, but how about we talk about the less sexy business models, incentives and labor market shifts driving and being driven by this technology,” Kak says.

Under her leadership, the AI Now Institute is emerging as one of the leading critics of the industry. She says understanding technology policy isn’t about studying the ins-and-outs of neural networks: “It's about understanding power.” 

In 2023, the institute released a seminal 103-page-report discussing how AI is concentrating power within the tech industry. Since then, they’ve advocated for producing an FDA-style body to regulate new AI models, interrogated the impact of the data-centers used to power AI on climate change, and released policy frameworks for governments on how to tackle the social risks of AI.

Today, Kak regularly advises members of Congress, the White House, the European Commission, and the U.K. government on AI policy. Kak was one of a handful of civil-society representatives at the inaugural AI Safety Summit in Bletchley last November. In July, Kak testified in the senate about the risks AI posed on user privacy.

“We’re at a clear inflection point in the trajectory of AI,” she said during her testimony. ”Without guardrails to set the rules of the road, we’re committing ourselves to carrying forward more of the same: extractive, invasive, and often predatory data practices and business models that characterized the past decade of the tech industry.”