OpenAI's secret lobbying dinner with top Canberra bureaucrats
Having helped send the artificial intelligence boom into overdrive, it was only a matter of time before OpenAI would let its lobbying muscle loose on Canberra, where politicians have historically been a little flat-footed in the face of new technological developments.
The OpenAI circus came to town in June for a widely publicised lobbying blitz, led by chief economist Ronnie Chatterji, who met with a posse of Labor frontbenchers including Andrew Leigh, Tim Ayres, Andrew Giles and Andrew Charlton. Lots of policy wonks are called Andrew, apparently.
Less attention fell on OpenAI's wooing of senior public servants. After a busy day on the hill, Chatterji and the company hosted a private dinner for top public servants at the Boat House, a modern Australian fine diner on the shores of Lake Burley Griffin.
On the dance card was the newly appointed Treasury Secretary Jenny Wilkinson (just days into the job), Australian Bureau of Statistics' top statistician David Gruen, Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet Deputy Secretary Nadine Williams, IP (intellectual property) Australia director general Michael Schwager and Peter Anstee from the Department of Home Affairs.
The Canberra dinner was just another piece in the Australian lobbying effort that is becoming increasingly sophisticated. The firm recently hired former Tech Council of Australia boss Kate Pounder to lead its local push as Australian policy liaison.
Before the Tech Council, Pounder co-founded analytics firm AlphaBeta with Labor assistant minister Charlton, who would later parachute from Bellevue Hill into the federal seat of Parramatta.
CBD was not a fly on the wall, and although it was a fairly standard reception for a visiting expert – Chatterji was an economic adviser in Joe Biden's White House – all parties remained shtum on the finer details of the discussions.
Nonetheless, we've many questions we'd love to grill OpenAI on. Will AI destroy work as we know it or trigger a robot apocalypse? How can we stop the public discourse from being flooded with slop? What did poor Hayao Miyazaki ever do to hurt you? Perhaps this will come up at the next roundtable.
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