In late October, President Joe Biden signed a first-of-its kind executive order that may affect some businesses in Central Florida and beyond. The wide-ranging order addresses artificial intelligence across industries: how it’s used, how it’s developed and what resources the government should offer to help companies take advantage of the technology.
Much of the concern around AI is for safety, and that is where Craig Stevenson comes in. The cybersecurity expert has strong opinions on the executive order, likely rooted in his 12 years of experience dealing with complex internet technology demands of all kinds.
He was head of the cyber exploitation unit at Arlington, Virginia-based Raytheon Technologies (NYSE: RTX) before launching his own startup HyperQube Technologies, which was acquired by Maitland-based ThreatLocker Inc. in March 2023. Stevenson moved to ThreatLocker with his platform where he now serves as director of operations.
Orlando Inno spoke with Stevenson to hear the tech expert’s take on the order and what he believes the implications could be in Central Florida:
In reading the executive order, does it seem fair?
Everyone is a lot more afraid of AI than they need to be. The order feels like a knee-jerk reaction. The technology they're legislating has been around forever and they only started caring when ChatGPT came out.
Why do you think that is?
Because it’s easy to use. Anyone can go use that piece of software, type something in and get a response. But as someone who has used AI in the past, I feel like ChatGPT is just a better Google.
What’s your experience with AI?
I studied artificial intelligence in college, and the tools and techniques used to build models. I understand what large language models are and how they work behind the scenes. All it's doing is really fancy sentence completion. That being said, I do think AI is going to lead to some big increases in productivity. As far as the technological leap is concerned, I liken it to same amount of productivity increase I got when I first started using Google.
How do you use ChatGPT?
Right now, if I search for an example of a piece of code that does a particular thing and I plug that search into Google, the first nine results are ads and the next 10 are websites with good search-engine optimization. I might not get to my answer. Plugging that search into ChatGPT feels like Google without ads or optimization.
The new executive order says if a company uses a dual-use model — which ChatGPT is because the dual uses essentially are beneficial or threatening, depending on how it’s applied — or is even thinking about using it, there's a large collection of reporting requirements it has to give to the U.S. Secretary of Commerce.
Bringing this home to Central Florida, have you encountered the executive order being debated among businesspeople?
No. That could be because a lot of companies claim they're doing AI behind the scenes, but they aren't actually doing anything resembling an AI, so they don't have any reporting requirements to be concerned about. If a company isn’t doing anything resembling AI, it wouldn't be using a lot of computational power, and it won't have to report anything because it won’t reach the threshold established in the order.
Are there ways to avoid reporting?
Since they gave very specific requirements for reporting based on how much hardware you use, you could just use one [central processing unit] less and now you don't have to report.
Should Orlando-area business owners be concerned about all this?
What I would say is if you're not sure if this applies to you, it probably doesn't. The hurdles for having to report — in terms of computational size — are pretty high. Meanwhile, there are a lot of lawyers billing a lot of hours trying to figure out what their clients are supposed to do.
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