Corporate executives discuss technology, ai and clean energy in washington dc. It is one hour and 40 minutes. Good afternoon, welcome to the axios whats next summit. Being here, thank you to the team. Im might allen, cofounder and this is one of our favorite days. It is like a reunion than we have been having fun together. Amazing program today discussing ai, how policy is changing. This gives us insights on business, technology and allows us to go deeper into how we work, play and live our lives. Our whats next featured amazing speakers such as hosea andres producer tim balint timb aland, just to name a few. We will hear from another set of amazing leaders. Not one, but two cabinet officials. Ai thought leaders such as a laundry nelson. It is so fun to look around the room and see so many friends. We call this our crystal ball event. We would like you to check out the hub downstairs. We have a demonstration of Virtual Reality of electric airplane. I tried in a irobot that sorts through trash. It is called of course, oscar. And i tried out the electric honda compact scooter and the suv. You cannot pack up the suv in your luggage, but the scooter. And i was like you could put this in the overhead. And it becomes a battery in the overhead. Im just going to respond, the scooter has a seat. We are honored to have frank mccoury, such a great pioneer. We are very honored at sxsw last week in austin. They had some great ideas about how we can improve and he is here. He and project liberty are here along with their president. We appreciate you being here. They are going to be signing books in the upstairs lab, so we appreciate project liberty. Thank you very much to you and your team for being here to tell us about reclaiming liberty, humanity and dignity in the digital age. It is a little tough to top, Bruce Springsteen calls this essential reading for our times. Host just to give you a sense of how the day is going to go, a quick rundown of the afternoon, we will have a short break in the middle of programming, so make it back in time when that is over because we have a full slate of programming after the break. You are welcome to stretch her legs, take a call, get a coffee in the lounge upstairs and if you need to refer to the agenda, it is on the badge that you are wearing or the screen upstairs. Take the short commute upstairs and connect with fellow attendees. Thank you so much. Host we would love for you to use the axios wns, what is next summit. On with the show, chief tech correspondent. [applause] thank you, mike and sara. This is my third time at whats next summit and i am more excited for our first speaker. This is a critical time for society. The advent of technology will reshape things. How it reshapes is yet to be determined and i am excited to start with a laundry nelson, she coauthored the ai bill of rights during her tenure as director of technology policy. Please thank me in please join me in welcoming dr. Nelson. I want to start off, and the discussion around ai, often when i hear it talked about, i hear it talked about as if it is going to be good or bad. Correct me if im wrong, but my thinking is it is going to process ones in zeros and whether it is good or bad depends on what we tolerate, incentivize, regulate. Some of that thinking is key to your work, but how do you think about these questions . How do we make sure we have good outcomes . Dr. Nelson that is the profound question and it is very powerful technology. It is complicated. There is enchantment about it. These are tools we create and they do not have agency even though people are building ai agents. What they become is up to us. We have to remain in the space of appreciating the work and regulation and education that will create the future we want. So when people say ai will cure cancer and mitigate climate change, that may be true. What is the case . None of it will just happen. We have the benefit of being early in a moment of a new technology that we can put in place hopefully infrastructure, norms, regulations to have potential good outcomes. If we do this, they are potential. Host it is not like if we use ai, that prevents bad outcomes. I want to rewind to when you were in the white house passing the ai bill of rights. What was the key thing you wanted enshrined . It was not locked. It was the first step. What were you hoping to achieve . Dr. Nelson we were taking up work of prior administrations. The Obama Administration had done work on ai. Policy issues the nation should think about. The trump administration, there was ai legislation passed. There was a national ai act passed. We are going to establish use ai and the government and it will be done with democratic values. It will be trustworthy. So the question for us into the Biden Harris Administration was what is it mean to have ai that we tried to make trustworthy. So in the administration we spun out a blueprint. It is not law, not legislation. Coming into office in the middle the pandemic, at a time when there was a lot of distrust about science, government, technology. How do we have a process to engage people in thinking about ai . We put the white house email address and said anyone can write to us. What are the things the American Public should ask for or how should we think about Ai Technology . We talked to School Teachers and High School Students and experts, local and state government, to get a sense of what they were worried about and get some Good Business partners and technological experts. What is the best we can do . The subtitle of the bill of rights is making principles into practices. We should not discriminate. There should be privacy. We were distilling commonsense things and trying to flag the initial things we know we can do, risk assessment, thirdparty audits of algorithms to flag how we might move ahead. That is what we were trying to accomplish. Moving from principles and how you operationalize and research the government. When you started on this project, looking at technology, that is something we need to look at. Risks. We have these technologies, it is powerful and flawed. Talk about what you see. [indiscernible] what have you found can happen today and people around the world . Dr. Nelson we started with something called the ai democracy project, studying the impact of algorithms on elections, democracy and back to the bill of rights, how is it impacting these things . The first study we did was working with election officials, a bipartisan effort. Because so many language models give you information that looks right. Unless you know specificity about a voting issue, it looks fine, it sounds great. We had an all day event that had people from society, the secretary of state from nevada. And we tested the chatbots on election information. I appreciate that 25 of americans have used chatbots. To the extent that they are, can they get reliable information . We had experts wait. More than half of them are inaccurate. They were harmful or inaccurate. Host given where the technology is today, and my right to think can you really trust a chatbot with elections . Dr. Nelson to me when it says go to www. I can vote, it looks credible. Communities were told africanamerican communities, there was no polling site because they could not be found. So we had challenges with the election and the discourse was about offensive content. Deliberate disinformation, voice cloning, and that is a problem that we are seeing. Host the problems you outlined, any maligned actor was given that information, people trying to mess things up, how powerful are the tools . How worried are you that social media posts are legitimate . People are deliberately trying to change them. Dr. Nelson it is already happening. If you think about the democratic primary, the cloning of president bidens voice, it is a problem. It happened in the 2016 election. They did not have these tools. So it was easy, even if it was for the laughs, it is easier now. You compound that with more dissemination and other social media and misinformation, the death by 1000 cuts. Those do not even work to provide accurate information. We cannot anticipate all challenges. It is a kind of cybersecurity these things were going to have to try to mitigate to the extent that we can. It will be a constant back and forth. Host do you have a sense where Tech Companies are on this . After the 2020 election, there was focus on Election Security and integrity. A lot of companies have scaledback the big ones. That is one thing. Then you have four people on the elections integrity team, right . Are you worried that the people Controlling Technology are not devoting enough resources . Dr. Nelson as we have seen, voluntary commitments from companies around ai and elections and wellmeaning discourse about wanting to be responsible. We cannot afford to mess this up and juliet and her team recently went back to chatbots with the same questions. We went to all the companies and said is what we found. They said we fixed it and it is still a problem. It is a problem for chatbots, but the hope for ai is that you can build whole worlds on these models. Foundations are not a foundation on which to build an ecosystem. An election ecosystem. If you cant get basic accurate information. Language models are being built into complex ai, ai systems are built into microsoft suite, office suite. It is a real challenge. If we want to use the Foundation Model as the foundation of the ecosystem, it is creaky, brittle and a real problem for democracy. Host chatbots generate information. But social media is where it gets broadcast. Weve heard a lot about tiktok. Im curious, with ai, a bunch of concerns, information bias. And robots might kill us all. You gotta have two separate conversations. Feels like were having a conversation about tiktok and the chinese influence on us, but countries are using American Social media. How important is it that we know facebook and what used to be twitter in addition to tiktok . Dr. Nelson we are having a challenge mitigating it because the challenge we face with tiktok potentially is who owns the data, where is it going. Some of the data we are concerned about is American Companies unregulated. The issue under all of it is really about data, we talk about general use. Data flows and the ecosystem is the ultimate dual use. Data is circulating and if we care about privacy and not capitalizing on data, even accounting for expert controls, and sell data to these countries, but not those countries, it is putting a bandaid on the larger issue. Data privacy regulation. That will not solve everything, but it will create a baseline of expectations making it more difficult for concerns that we have from maligned actors and people. Host so would you also been tiktok . Is that not happening not helping. It matters who owns tiktok. I was i think we should regulate social Media Companies and platforms. And that can be done we have not done that. Some issues are because we have not for decades done these basic things. So lets see. Host i could talk about stuff for hours. I hope you will continue to be a voice and thank you so much for what you do. Dr. Nelson thank you. [applause] host introducing senior media reporter sarah fisher. Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us. Im so excited to have the chairman returned to our stage after we last had him on in 20. Espn launched efforts to bring the network into the streaming era. Please join me in welcoming them. Host thank you for doing this. Great to be here. Host there is no shortage of news when it comes to espn. There are reports around your latest deal. There are reports that the deal is done. Is there any truth to that . College sports, incredibly important to espn and they have been for decades. That includes College Football and the playoffs. Im happy to announce here and now that we have come to an agreement with the College Football playoffs and extending our partnership for the next six years. There are two components to this. Expansion from four to twelve teams, we have two seasons left on our deal. We got the amendment done, that gave us the ability to broadcast additional games. So youre going from three to 11 games. So that is closed. Part two is expansion. We maintain rights to broadcast through the playoffs, we are announcing that now. Host a round of applause. To follow up, does this deal address the expansion . James it does expand to 14 teams. Host how close is the price tag to reality . James we do not talk about fees, average value. I will say a good deal is when both sides are happy. We feel good about the deal and everyone involved feels really good. Long process, they had to get issues resolved among conferences etc. And they did. When they did, we were ready because we had been working for so long, as soon as they came back and said we have alignments we got our deal signed. Host where does espn stand with nba and wnba rights . James the nba is incredibly important and we are in our exclusive negotiating window, that was part of the current deal. That is part of the deal. So we are engaged not just to espn, but when we broadcast the finals, we have nbc broadcasting games. We want to get this done. We see the league as ascending. A much younger audience, i saw a stat that 56 i read that this morning, 56 of nba fans are under the age of 44. We talked about our priorities and we start with audience expansion. A big component is attracting a younger audience. Host how much do women sports play . Caitlin clark is bringing a lot of momentum. Should we expect them to go big . James women sports has been a priority since before i got to espn and weve taken pride in how we have grown sports. The wnba will be a part of any deal. We are seeing the same thing on the wnba side. The draft with Caitlin Clark declaring she was going to go pro. We have an original series around college basketball. It is called fullcourt press focused on collegiate basketball , on nbc and espn plus. It will be nice to have the wba w nba brooklyn. We could not be more excited about renewing our deal with ncaa and womens collegiate sports championships. Host in the National Womens soccer league. James yes, we announced the nws l, we kicked it off this past saturday on abc with the kansas city game in the firstever purpose built stadium for womens professional sports. That was exciting. Host lets pivot to other aspects of innovation. You announced a joint venture to create direct to consumer products. Rupert murdoch expects 5 Million People will sign up. If you do the math, 40 or 50 does not seem like it will be incremental. What is the point when you are announcing a second effort. James it is about giving the consumer more options. There are over 50 million households and we believe they are sports fans. The idea is to speak to them and get them off the sidelines. Number two, this is simplicity. What we hear about from sports fans is frustration in terms of fragmentation. If you are a sports fan you need several apps, usernames and passwords. You have several charges and we said this is our opportunity to Work Together with fox and warner bros. Discovery to create a centralized experience. A good chunk of sports more than just espn has to offer. We just want to highlight that each of us it is a joint venture we are investing in equally. This is a digital so we are going to take out of it what we typically get paid from another m. V. P. Host all of your Telecom Cable relationships are ok with this . James our team is in regular conversations. My understanding is they understand this is about the customer, identifying a gap. Our mission is to serve sports fans anytime, anywhere. When we decided we were going to make espn available direct to consumer and the fall, we asked if there was another opportunity and we concluded yes, a joint venture. We are going to remain cable, satellite bundle with youtube tv and hulu live. That will remain a priority. On the other end of this, we believe there is an ocean in between. Host what are you thinking in terms of the price . James 40 to 50 had been reported, that range feels right to me. Host a lot of espn momentum is around football. How do you prevent this from becoming a seasonal subscription, where someone comes in in august ahead of preseason and cuts after the super bowl . Host great question. It is about content. James the joint venture will address part of that because it is more content for the sports fan then espn, fox, warner bros. In the aggregate, it is compelling if you look at it through an mlb lens, and lens or College Football. It is compelling. On top of that, studio programming is worldclass. Where i think no one would have been surprised years ago with our ratings were down. Studio ratings were up and to the right. That is amazing. When you have a 67 decline in the universe and you see ratings up and to the right month after month. 19 consecutive months, it may be 20 but i think it is 19. It is up in their ratings yearoveryear. Setting records, one of the best programs available today. We take a lot of pride in the fact that we have studio programming and digital film content. Host a quick thing before we move on, you are in washington. Weve reported that youre looking at tv. Do you have regulatory concerns . James i cannot comment. What i will say is i will reiterate my point, take a step back. This is a consumer friendly offering. This is giving sports fans another option. And simplifying the sports experience. Host lets go back to studio programming. 3430 is in the past. What is your commitment to originals . Are you shifting . James we remain committed. If you look at brand research, it is one of our best performing brands with young people. So continuing to invest in stories we think move the needle, so if you walk the halls you will hear people talking about bigger and bolder. We take a lot of pride in Properties Like derek jeter or man in the arena with tom brady. We have a documentary or a series coming out, so already mention fullcourt press which will follow Caitlin Clark. It is that spirit, stories that we think will will will move the needle for us, so you can expect more of that from us. Host you had pat mcafee coming in to license program. You have no editorial control. One of the things we hear