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Scaling Laws: How to Use, Govern, and Lead on AI? Rep. Begich Points the Path Forward
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- [00:00]
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- [01:19]
Representative Nick Begich
It's the lawfare Podcast Alan I'm Alan Rosenstein, associate Professor of law at the University of Minnesota and a senior editor and research director at lawfare. Today we're bringing you something a little different, an episode from our new podcast series, Scaling Laws. It's a creation of lawfare and the University of Texas School of Law, where we're tackling the most important AI and policy questions. From new legislation on Capitol Hill to the latest breakthroughs that are happening in the labs, we cut through the hype to get you up to speed on the rules, standards and ideas shaping the future of this pivotal technology. If you enjoy this episode, you can find and subscribe to Scaling Laws wherever you get your podcasts and follow us on X and bluesky. Thanks for listening. When the AI overlords take over, what are you most excited about?
- [02:11]
Kevin Frazier
It's not crazy, it's just smart.
- [02:14]
Representative Nick Begich
And just this year, in the first six months, there have been something like a thousand laws.
- [02:18]
Kevin Frazier
Who's actually building the scaffolding around how it's going to work, how everyday folks are going to use it?
- [02:23]
Representative Nick Begich
AI only works if society lets it work.
- [02:26]
Kevin Frazier
There are so many questions have to be figured out, and nobody came to my bonus class. Let's enforce the rules of the road. Welcome back to Scaling Laws, the podcast brought to you by lawfare and the University of Texas School of Law. I'm Kevin Frazier, the AI innovation and Law Fellow at UT and a senior editor at Lawfare, here to tackle the important intersection of AI policy and of course, the law. Today's guest is U.S. representative Nick Begich, who is a proud voice for the people of Alaska. We dive into the latest twists and turns in AI policy as well as outline a path to continued U.S. leadership in AI innovation. Rep. Begich is in a unique position to shape these conversations. Before entering public service, he spent much of his career in the software industry. Today as a member of the House Committee for Natural Resources as well as the Committee on Science, Space and Technology, he has a key perspective on how America can lead on the infrastructure and technology questions posed by AI development. Giddy up for a great show and as always, please leave us a review and follow us on X and BlueSky. Representative Begich, welcome to Scaling Laws.
- [03:36]
Representative Nick Begich
It's great to be here, Kevin. Thanks for having me.
- [03:38]
Kevin Frazier
Yeah. So when folks talk about Congress, they rarely say, boy, it's just full of these tech wizards and these folks who really get technology and, and yet we've got you. And folks may not realize that in addition to Ted Lieu who often gets cited as one of the more tech forward members, or Jay Obernolty who also has a background in technology, you yourself are no stranger to tech. So tell us, what were you doing before you were making the trek from Anchorage to D.C. regularly?
- [04:08]
Representative Nick Begich
Yeah, so my career has been predominantly spent in the technology sector. I founded a software development company that grew to about 150 folks. We built custom software products mostly for startups, but also for the enterprise. And we would often help coach our early stage companies in the development of their businesses. We'd take equity stakes sometimes in these businesses and be a part of their growth story. But yeah, my career started on the tech side at Ford Motor Company in Dearborn, Michigan and later with the software company that I founded. It's been amazing to see what's happened with respect to the software space as one of the first majorly disrupted industries by large language model AI revolution. But that's been my background. So it's great. When you come to Congress, you have a portfolio of expertise. People come in, you've got physicians, you've got former service members, you've got people from the intelligence community. You have folks who've spent time in state government or municipal government and so you get a wide variety of experiences. But you're right, there's not a lot of folks that come from the technology industry in Congress.
- [05:29]
Kevin Frazier
Well, and I think that part of the issue is we don't necessarily need all coders to become congressmen. Right. That might actually be quite awkward. No offense to coders, but they're not always known for their eloquence or their capacity for deliberation. But I'll leave that for a different conversation. But we do need to make sure that folks have awareness of what's going on in the technological domain, and I think most critically, knowing what questions to ask, because oftentimes we shouldn't expect that congressmen are in the weeds of what a world model is. Knowing to ask the question of what is a world model or what's coming down the pike is so important. Have you found that to be the case?
- [06:07]
Representative Nick Begich
Well, it is. It's all about the questions. You know, there's a proverb that says, he who asks the right questions cannot avoid the answers. This is something that I live by. Look, we don't know everything. There is no one person out there that knows it all. And as I mentioned, people come in with different sets of experiences. But if you know how to drill down on core topics and you're not afraid to ask those questions, you'll learn quickly. So one of the challenges of any member of Congress, and certainly this is true for me as being the only representative in the United States House from Alaska, right. We're just a. We're a big state with a small population.
- [06:43]
Kevin Frazier
One and done. You only get one.
- [06:45]
Representative Nick Begich
Only me. So I don't have the ability to share my portfolio of responsibilities with other members of my state delegation in the House because I'm it. So if it's healthcare, I got to know about that. If it's Social Security, I need to know about that. If it's military, I need to know about that. If it's tech, I need to know about that. You name the issue, I've got to know a lot about a lot of things. And so you've got to be able to ask the right questions to drill down and get the information that you need in order to make effective policy.
- [07:14]
Kevin Frazier
No pressure on you. There having to be a nick of all trades with that mentality. I wonder, having a background in entrepreneurial activity, do you think that also lends a hand, especially on tackling some of these frontier issues of not necessarily being okay to just say, well, D.C. is going to D.C. the swamp's going to be a swamp. But instead, really pressing and saying, what can we do to actually solve problems?
- [07:39]
Representative Nick Begich
100%? Look, when we worked with entrepreneurs, we're navigating them as a Sherpa through that valley of death. That's so often talked about. It was very simple at a high level. You've got to have a product. You got to have a product that customers have proven with voting, with their dollars, that they're willing to pay for. You put those together and get investment and grow and scale that business. We would do that across industries. People would often ask me, what industry did you focus on? We did everything. Anything but video games. We would be involved. So it gave me a lot of diversity of perspective and sort of trained myself and my team to drill down on things that we weren't familiar with at the outset, but use sort of first principles and say, okay, there is a similar pathway. It's a different context, but how do we navigate that pathway to something that's going to be successful for the entrepreneur that we're working with? So I think that when you come in to Congress, taking that approach can be very good, not just because of asking good questions and understanding sort of those first principle models. How do we move things through to fruition, but how do you get creative? How do you do things that people haven't tried before or try a different angle on an old problem? When you can do that, maybe you can bust through and get to solutions that have been elusive for a long period of time.
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Kevin Frazier
Yeah, Congress is not exactly known for its creativity. And I find it's just so helpful to have that breath of fresh air, and in your case, very cold air. Coming from Alaska, I promise, Chris, I only make Alaska jokes this whole podcast. Although it's very tempting. I'm very proud of my self restraint. But thinking about the Sherpa metaphor which you brought up, not me. If we think of shepherding Congress through this AI challenge, how's Congress doing right now? Where do you think we are? Where is the estimation of their capacity to kind of mount this very tricky, complex challenge? Where do we stand right now?
- [09:40]
Representative Nick Begich
Well, I think we're behind the curve. I think we're probably further ahead than most other nations. But, you know, AI is moving at a geometric rate. Right. We're experiencing incredible sort of J curve growth right now, and we don't know when we're going to hit the S part of that curve. Even the strongest researchers in the space couldn't tell you where this starts to plateau. And so, you know, Congress has to deal with this issue. But Congress is built as a deliberative body. The Congress is built to help ensure that we're making smart, durable policy. And so there's effectively a legislative, constitutionally instantiated lever on the speed at which we can get things done. And when you encounter something that's moving as quickly as AI, it can put a lot of stress and strain on a body that's intended to really deeply think about what policies are appropriate for any emergent industry or technology. And so look, there's a lack of information in the Congress, a lack of awareness about not just what is AI, but what are the implications of artificial intelligence across the domains of responsibility that each of us have on the committees to which we've been assigned.
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Kevin Frazier
And that's been one of my chief frustrations is we're more than three years into this, and depending who you ask, we may be more than 50 years into this. Right. If you want to say, well, we defined AI back in 1955, so on and so forth. But it seems to me like we're still having somewhat elementary conversations about AI. And the perhaps best signal of that is the fact that we're still just referring to this as the AI conversation, as if it's a umbrella term that actually is sufficient to describe all of these myriad circumstances in which we're deploying it in house and so on and so forth.
- [11:38]
Representative Nick Begich
There's so many different use cases. You can think of a use case every 30 seconds. And we could be here all day long still thinking of use cases. But it reminds me sort of that turn of the century conversation around the World Wide web and what we used to call E business. And I recall there were entire classes on E business. Now it's just business. The E has sort of woven its way into every aspect of commerce, whether that's purchasing things online or engaging in sort of back office operations. It's hard to imagine a situation, but this is how it used to work, where people were faxing things and copying things. Now we've got email and we've got all these things. We thought of that at the time as somehow different from the core workflows that we engaged in. It was not different from the core workflows, but it took time for everyday folks out there to integrate this in a way that made sense. And now it's sort of in the background. I think AI may follow a similar path as people become more familiar with how this tool set is going to augment their existing workflows and automate, in many cases, their existing workflows. I think what's sort of different this time is the speed at which this integration is occurring and the disruption with which the integration may take place.
- [13:13]
Kevin Frazier
Well, and I want to go back briefly to your point about Congress being somewhat slow on this. And some people will say by golf, what the heck is wrong with Congress? They've had three years to figure this out. They should have passed a law within six months of ChatGPT 3.5 being released. But as you pointed out, in some ways, this is Congress working as intended, working as designed.
- [13:37]
Representative Nick Begich
It is. And here's the thing, too. The members drive Congress. But you know who really drives Congress? The staff. Right. And so the Hill staff is adopting these tools faster for sure than the members of Congress. Okay. And that's not a criticism to my colleagues, but it's a function of the work that needs to get done. You know, the staff within the Senate, the staff within the House, we have limited budgets, right? So we have a certain headcount that we can have, and that headcount gets dedicated to certain things. We're always finding that there's more work to do than there are people to do it. And so the staff has logically turned to AI to support workflow that will help to accelerate them in their daily work. And certainly we've adopted that in our office. We help other offices understand that. But I think that becomes a driver for adoption and awareness inside of the membership structure. Right. Where the staff ultimately ends up driving awareness for the member.
- [14:43]
Kevin Frazier
And this is one of my favorite parts about going and talking about AI. Whoever invites me to go to random corners of the country, including Alaska, I
- [14:50]
Representative Nick Begich
got to go more than we went
- [14:51]
Kevin Frazier
to Anchorage and hang out with AG Stephen Cox, which was a welcome invitation. But when you go and demo these products and just help folks realize that it's not going to blow up your computer or cause the end of humanity, just seeing how boring AI is, that's what I love. I go and I talk to judges and I often say, all right, here's a recent state Supreme Court opinion. You have 5 minutes to read the entire opinion and give me a 500 word summary. And I say, go. And some of them don't even try to pull out their phone. Meanwhile, I just demo a deep research project and show how quickly I can get that analysis. And then I translate it into Spanish and the scales just fall from their eyes and they realize how boring AI can be. And yet transformative.
- [15:36]
Representative Nick Begich
Transformative. That is the right word for it.
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Kevin Frazier
And so I wonder for your own office, because I don't think enough folks are hearing about AI actually being adopted in Congress. What does this look like for you all? How are you?
- [15:48]
Representative Nick Begich
Well, we've actually built a training program for our colleagues.
- [15:52]
Noom Advertiser
Wow.
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Representative Nick Begich
Yeah. So we are establishing some thought leadership in the space and it goes from sort of beginner to maybe high level, intermediate. We say, okay, well, what's a large language model? What are some of the tools out there that you can use? Believe it or not, there are still people that don't know what these things are. Don't integrate them. Then how do you integrate this as a team? How do you build projects? How do you deploy Agentix? How do you define core workflows in your daily tasks that could be accelerated or the quality improved or both? Right. How do you leverage the tool set as a force multiplier for you and the member that you're working for? I think that once people realize, similar to the, to the situation that you just described to a judge, right, where you're saying, hey, do this large volume of work in a short period of time and then translate it into a language you may not know well or at all, once we walk people through those use cases, adoption becomes the natural progression.
- [17:03]
Kevin Frazier
And I think that a central challenge is just being transparent and helping, for example, your constituents understand that force multiplier effect. Because if the question is, do you want staff alone going through hundreds, if not thousands of constituent inquiries and perhaps getting to that response weeks, if not months later, or being augmented with AI, being able to triage, hey, this request actually needs attention right now, and so on and so forth, that to me helps folks see, okay, this is the true value add. We're not using this to try to dumb down our work or give you a bad response. We want to reach out and prioritize certain responses.
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Representative Nick Begich
That's correct. So I'll tell you on the flip side, it can jam up an office, right? Because a lot of folks who spend time sending communications to offices, they can pump out a lot more communication as well. And so it works both ways. One of the things that I think is really interesting that we've observed in our office and other offices on the Hill, and I think may be common outside of politics, is the idea that the staff can spin up a lot of work for a physical individual who has to make decisions, you find the number of decisions that you make in a given day can dramatically increase. Now the human in the middle kind of bottleneck becomes very apparent when your team has the tools to be five times more productive and provides you with five times more of the decision making that needs to be done. So that that, I think becomes sort of a hidden governing factor to the AI adoption curve is ultimately, there will be humans in some of these nodal decision points that have to make a call up, down, left, right, yes, no. And their cognitive load can sort of act as a governor on adoption.
- [19:04]
Kevin Frazier
That's one of the more exciting questions to me is this kind of future of governance question of how do we reimagine how constituent services are done, how legislative drafting occurs, Even crazy ideas like using digital twins to simulate how legislation is going to actually be implemented in the real world. All these crazy 20, 30, 2035 scenarios.
- [19:26]
Representative Nick Begich
Maybe not that far off.
- [19:27]
Kevin Frazier
Maybe not that far off. Well, to ground this in some more mundane questions, sure. We're seeing a tremendous amount of activity at the state level right now when it comes to regulating AI. And one of the difficulties I think has been sort of having allstates see that this is indeed a whole of nation approach, right? Where this is an all hands on deck moment where we need data centers across the country, we need data from individuals across the country, and we need AI adoption to be taking place across the country. And yet in your own backyard, snowy, very far away, we're seeing some debates about when and how Alaska, for example, should be building out data centers. Can you detail what's going on in your own backyard?
- [20:13]
Representative Nick Begich
You know, it's interesting because I think a lot of times folks, policymakers in some parts of our state, I mean, we're a big state, different perspectives throughout the state. But some parts of our state policymakers look at what's happening in the debates here in the lower 48, right? And they say, hey, if that's an issue there, do we need to think about it as an issue here? Now, we've heard about the question of social life license as it relates to data centers, right? People have an expressed concern in many areas of the country about the impact on their utility bills. And I think data centers done right actually lower the costs for consumers. And I think that the industry as a whole probably needs to do a better job communicating where that happens and make sure that that happens at a minimum, that those rates are not rising appreciably for consumers of energy. What's unique about Alaska, perhaps among the other states, is that we have hundreds of trillions of cubic feet of natural gas stranded right now on Alaska's north Slope. We've got great connectivity to the state. We've got nice fiber lines that go down to the lower 48, connect us to the rest of the world. Great satellite coverage up there as well for compute intensive data centers. Alaska is a perfect spot. It's cold, right? We know that, we know that, but it's great for data centers. Lowers your power consumption costs. We've got the largest pool of energy that's untapped in North America sitting right there waiting for some folks to come up and tap it. What's great about Alaska's model is that the state of Alaska and its citizens share in the wealth of the resources. So unlike other states in the country, and this is what a lot of people don't realize down in Texas, all of the resource wealth is privatized. In Alaska, that resource wealth is shared. So we have a sovereign wealth fund called the Permanent Fund in Alaska. And the permanent fund issues what we call the Permanent Fund dividend, which is a payment to every resident of Alaska based on the performance of that fund. Well, the fund is initially funded by oil and gas and mineral revenues. So a portion of that goes into the fund and then is invested in a diversified portfolio of private equity, VC stocks, bonds, et cetera. So we are aligned because if we have a mechanism to monetize those energy resources, it benefits everyone in the state. And I think that's a unique model. You don't see it, to my knowledge, anywhere else in the country where you get a direct benefit from the resource development that's happening in the state. So the state generally very supportive of responsible resource development. And I think there's a real opportunity in Alaska for data centers, particularly low resource requirement data centers where it's commodity equipment, you know, blade servers, pop one in, pop one out. It doesn't require huge staffing, it's not multi tenant generally that's perfect for us. And I think there are a lot of opportunities for people to explore in Alaska. We're certainly ready and willing to facilitate that.
- [23:25]
Kevin Frazier
Yeah. And I think this speaks to the fact that a lot of these conversations occur without any nuance. Right. It's data center good or bad. There's no sort of consideration that there are different kinds of data centers. Data centers serve different purposes for different communities, require different amounts of energy, so on and so forth.
- [23:42]
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- [23:42]
Kevin Frazier
And so just having that more nuanced conversation and getting to that basic literacy can really help have a more, for lack of a better phrase, adult conversation.
- [23:50]
Representative Nick Begich
You're 100% right. I mean a multi tenant data center has different requirements than single single tenant data centers. When you're talking about commodity equipment, that's different. When you talk about the fact that AI and crypto are compute intensive, they're not really data intensive. Once the data is in the data center. If you're running a training model, it's there. The queries that go into an AI model LLM are very small and the packets that come out are very small. So connectivity is less of a constraint than it it perhaps used to be or would be under a multi tenant data center Traditional web data center model
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- [28:59]
Kevin Frazier
So where's the logjam in your opinion? Because even though we're having this highly sophisticated conversation about data centers and getting into the weeds of it, we still see these headlines about data center good, data center bad. And we still see some fellow members of Congress proposing things like moratoria on data center development. And so is this a matter of just political incentives? Is this a matter of a lack of literacy? Is it both?
- [29:24]
Representative Nick Begich
Yes.
- [29:25]
Kevin Frazier
And feel free to name names or be as vicious as you'd like.
- [29:28]
Representative Nick Begich
Well, yeah, it's all the above. I mean, a lot of this is political opportunism, people thinking, I'll jump on this message and you know it will help me politically with a constituency back home. It can be someone coming in, a lobbyist, or somebody bending a member's ear and changing their perspective on something without providing full facts. It can also be out of genuine concern where someone says, this is my perception right now. And here again, the AI leadership needs to be on the Hill, and they are. But they need to continue to work individual members to provide them with accuracy, information about how this helps communities, how this is good for the United States, how it's imperative strategically. All those things are important considerations before people start putting legislation in motion.
- [30:21]
Kevin Frazier
We know that a lie travels at least twice as fast as the truth, right?
- [30:25]
Representative Nick Begich
That's right.
- [30:26]
Kevin Frazier
We'll attribute that to Mark Twain or whoever he would have liked us to attribute it to. And I think we've seen some of those early hot takes on data center energy usage and water usage, for example, have become just so entrenched in people's minds. And yet I very much encourage any listener of the POD to follow Andy Masley. He's just got so much great information on this front and helps really show that we need to be more in depth about what it means for data center development to occur and that perhaps it isn't as onerous and as destructive as some people.
- [31:00]
Representative Nick Begich
It's really not. And I think one of the things that we, that we're tracking certainly in my office is look at the compute curve inside of crypto as a forecaster of where things go in AI. If you're talking about Bitcoin mining as an example, SHA256 hashing has become pretty much a dead on commodity. Right. So no longer is it how much compute can I fit onto a chip or sell you? Right. It's how much compute per watt. Right. And so the sort of the innovation curve has gone to power efficiency. And I think AI will follow ultimately a similar curve. Because it's so compute intensive and it's so energy intensive, I think that we're going to continue to see investments in that part of the curve. Okay, we know what compute looks like. How do we make it more energy efficient? Because that's the fastest pathway to increasing the amount of AI power that we deploy. Because right now it's the energy that's becoming the limiting factor for adoption, speed, not the ability to produce chipsets. And so as that continues to magnify as a constraint, I think the industry's R and D budgets will align to efficiency. That energy efficiency is going to ultimately be what dictates the curve for AI progress on a chipset.
- [32:44]
Kevin Frazier
It's telling that a lot of the major labs are making these sorts of incredible investments in clean renewable power, for example, to drive these data centers forward. Because they don't want high operational costs. Right. They want to be operating for as long and as cleanly as possible.
- [33:01]
Representative Nick Begich
That's right. But there's also if we're going to decentralize AI because right now data centers are effectively a centralized AI conversation. But if you want to push AI into the edge the network and have basically semi autonomous AI devices, efficiency is the name of the game.
- [33:22]
Kevin Frazier
And that's where those sort of smaller data centers you were mentioning could really play a role, especially in places like Alaska or other rural locations. But I know we've been framing this in a fairly positive sense. I do want to acknowledge that data centers of course cause disruption to communities. There's new transmission lines that are going to be developed, new cars, trucks, construction that's going on, so on and so forth. But, but this is where I think the framing of this AI build out as a national prerogative really has to be made clear. Because surely no one wants electricity lines being built across their farm or a new interstate highway coming through their community. But for the development of these critical infrastructures that have unleashed and created new markets, it is something that everyone ultimately has to contribute to.
- [34:08]
Representative Nick Begich
They're going to benefit from it. And this is where I just challenge the assumption that folks, folks don't want these transmission lines, don't want these roads coming through their communities. There will always be folks that say, look, this is impacting me. We have to work with that. There's going to be folks who are always going to complain. There are folks that are actually anti growth, don't want to see development at all. But I think when we're talking about infrastructure, roads, highways, bridges, when you're talking about transmission lines, a lot of this infrastructure hasn't been refreshed in decades and is aging, it's crumbling out and it needs to be replaced. This gives us a true business case to drive that forward. I think there's going to be a lot of benefits for communities. Yes, there will be some impacts, but at the end of the day, in the aggregate, I think that it's going to bring a lot of benefits to folks.
- [34:59]
Kevin Frazier
It's really that long term perspective that we often need in these infrastructure conversations. Because of course if you ask someone, would you like a jackhammer going off in your backyard from 8 to 5 or no one's going to sign me up. I can't wait to have this Zoom meeting interrupted or so on and so forth. But that long term perspective of now, we've got this new market, we've got these new opportunities, this new airport, so on and so forth, those are the things that drive progress, that create new jobs.
- [35:25]
Representative Nick Begich
That's right.
- [35:25]
Kevin Frazier
And so forth.
- [35:26]
Representative Nick Begich
And look, if you're not growing, you're dying. There's no such thing as stasis. Right. I mean, even when things look like it's stasis, you've got depreciation on assets, things that are hidden. You don't see we need growth in this country. Country. It's good for us. And Lord knows other nations are going to pick up that ball if we don't.
- [35:45]
Kevin Frazier
Well, and this is where I'm so excited that we're talking during the 250th anniversary. Because if you look back through all of our history, it's the fact that we had the Erie Canal, it's the fact that we led on the railroad, it's the fact that we built out the whole Internet infrastructure that have been at the core of all of our future economic growth. But turning to your own agenda.
- [36:06]
DeleteMe Advertiser
Yeah.
- [36:07]
Kevin Frazier
You're a freshman, you're diving into the weeds from the get go.
- [36:10]
Representative Nick Begich
Yes.
- [36:11]
Kevin Frazier
What are some of your priorities from a AI perspective in terms of the bills you're supporting or the bills you're advocating for advancing yourself?
- [36:18]
Representative Nick Begich
Yeah. So I'm proud to report, you know, we have passed more legislation than anyone in Congress so far in the 119th Congress is a freshman office rookie of the year. Well, you've got mine on. Okay. Yeah. So we've been effective at getting things done now. Now, some of those things are Alaska specific, but some of the Alaska specific legislation that we have carried has national implications. Okay. So what we did in the budget reconciliation bill last year, and this of course, didn't get a whole lot of press nationally, a lot of press back home. We mandated 30 million acres of oil and gas lease sales over the next 10 years. Now this is important because if we're going to unlock the natural gas resources of Alaska, we've got to be able to have that in law. One of the things that happens, and we all see it in various ways in our communities, when one president comes in, they've got one perspective. When another president comes in, that person has another perspective. And that pendulum of activity can really disrupt long term, particularly infrastructure investment and certainly AI investment. And so what we're looking for is durable law that allows us to build predictability. Because if you've got an investor that's going to make an investment in a 20 or 30 year asset, well, the payback period on that is probably going to be at minimum, five years, probably more like seven to 10 years. And you can't have a pendulum swinging around during that period of time because that's where you're going to be able to justify the investment. We've looked for opportunities in Alaska to make us attractive as a state and provide those energy resources to whoever may need it. AI being right up there on the list. Now, I'm also getting ready to introduce the House version of the Data act and the Data act for those who haven't been tracking what's happening on this bill. It was introduced by Tom Cotton in the Senate. And the bill's essential premise is to reduce the amount of regulatory burden required for new AI data center capacity. So traditionally, if you're connecting into the grid, you've got a huge regulatory set of action items that you've got to check off before you can deploy new power into the grid. And a lot of requirements as it relates to what happens in down states where you've got some power coming offline. You have a responsibility to feed your power into the grid. You can't necessarily be the sole consumer of that power. In fact, you can't be the sole consumer of that power when you're connecting into the rest of the grid. Well, this would allow folks to build out completely behind the meter. In fact, there wouldn't be a meter. It would just be their own independent power. If they're the sole consumer of that power, they would not be subject to those regulations. And this would allow the data center community, if passed, to be able to say, look, incredibly so our power draw does not impact the consumer whatsoever because we're not connecting into the grid, we're not drawing power from the grid, we're utilizing our own power source. And this is consistent with what we've seen from large players like Meta and Thropic and others who are looking seriously or are moving forward in building out their own separate capacity. This would help to accelerate that.
- [39:45]
Kevin Frazier
And I think that longer term infrastructure vision is so important because when you talk to folks about AI, everyone seems to be asking what's going to happen next week, what's going to happen next month? And when you have that sort of rush to regulate because you hear everyone talking about what's coming right around the corner, you forget that we're going to be at this for decades. Right? This isn't going away. This is going to be something we really have to build out and sustain again if we're going to compete with our competitors and with our adversaries.
- [40:16]
Representative Nick Begich
That's right, that's correct. This is a long term play. This is a long term layer that is being put into place and we have to prepare for not just what we know of today, but prepare the infrastructure for what may be around the corner that we don't necessarily have a way to envision, but we need to create a space for.
- [40:37]
Kevin Frazier
And can you speak to, from the perspective of an entrepreneur, why this sort of patchwork problem is actually a problem? Because some folks will say, look, startups, they've been carved out from these regulations, or perhaps they're operating at such a small scale that 50 state requirements, they don't really care. But from your perspective earlier, you mentioned the importance of stability from an investor standpoint. This is where I think folks black out and forget the fact that if you're an investor, which is the only reason we have a startup economy, people willing to gamble on the small guy is you need predictability.
- [41:15]
Representative Nick Begich
You're not going to say indispensable component, right? Yes, there are many components you need, but you can't do it without that component.
- [41:21]
Kevin Frazier
You do not escape the garage if you can't open the garage door. That's right. Finding ways for investors to feel like, okay, I can put a sizable amount of money in here because I see the legal path forward. That's actually imperative. Can you talk to why that's a critical view?
- [41:37]
Representative Nick Begich
Well, it's imperative because look, for one, your total addressable market shrinks every time that one state or other jurisdiction decides that they want to do things differently or not at all. And so that becomes a challenge, right? Hitting critical mass and scale. Because remember, it's not just what we're building here, but these products will be utilized around the world. Right? And so if anytime that you're reducing that market size, you're diminishing the investor case for one, two, you diminish the innovation envelope. Right? And what we've seen in what the federal government did, and I think wisely at the dawn of the World Wide Web was sort of assured that there would be a level playing field, that platforms wouldn't be heavily responsible for the content as long as they weren't editing that content. That's something that's come up over the last few years. Right. We've seen platforms decide that they want to start managing, curating content, elevating some over others, and that kind of crosses over into a different space. But I think there has to be room for platforms to innovate, to make sure there's an addressable market and to make sure that the larger states in the country don't drive the results for everybody else. We see this in auto manufacturing. I mentioned earlier, I used to work at Ford Motor Company. When California passes a law with respect to auto manufacturers, it can forcibly change what Happens in the rest of the country because of scale economics, because of shipping regulations, for a whole host of reasons. And we don't want to see that approach taken in a space that's rapidly evolving and rapidly growing and cause the nation to miss out on a generational opportunity. There's been a lot of thought leadership dedicated to what happens in the J curve if you fall behind. And if you're six months behind by many metrics, you might as well be in the Stone Age. That's how fast this is evolving. And so we can't afford to wait around and see where things land. If we do this wrong, we only get one shot at this.
- [43:51]
Kevin Frazier
Well, and it is important to emphasize too, that the current AI trajectory we're on isn't necessarily the end all be all right. We may see new branches, new technologies we mentioned earlier, world models, for example. And if we foreclose discovering those new branches while other countries are racing ahead on that critical rd, for example, then to your point, we may become way far behind, way faster than we could ever have imagined.
- [44:14]
Representative Nick Begich
That's 100% right. I mean, most people are familiar with the large language models because that's what they see and touch. But. But as these tools become more specialized to specific industries and models get tweaked and constructed around specific use case sets or arrays, then you really start to see a lot of snowball innovation in frontier science. Right. And so a lot of what you see right now is corollary, it's okay, this model's been trained on this data set. I'm not fully familiar with the data set as an individual. It dives in, it finds information that I wouldn't have found quickly. Right. So a lot of what we see with LLM is an acceleration of what a human would have been able to do with enough time. Right. So you can think of some of this, some of these use cases as a search engine on steroids. But when you start to talk about what we're seeing in mathematics, in physics, in chemistry. Right. In pharmaceuticals, these are specific models that may use some of the base technology, but they've been tweaked to really specialize in pushing science forward, you don't want to miss out on those opportunities. That's where real transformation comes in.
- [45:34]
Kevin Frazier
And those are the boring AI use cases that don't make the New York Times headlines. Right. Of 2% marginal improvement in material sciences just doesn't sell papers. But it is the thing that lays the foundation for so much progress ahead.
- [45:46]
Representative Nick Begich
Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah. You think about rare diseases, you think about agricultural yield, some of these things, they're exciting to me, probably not exciting to many readers, but I think this is where we can see sort of that abundance perspective on AI take shape. There's been a lot of discussion around which way does the curve ultimately go with respect to its impact on humanity. I'm one who believes that there is a real strong and exciting prospect for broad based abundance that carries forward the abundance we saw in the last 150, 200 years where you've seen huge portion of the world's population lifted out of poverty. I think we can have some real transformational abundance that can come with the innovations that are discovered with AI over the next decade or so.
- [46:37]
Kevin Frazier
Right. And that progress didn't happen by accident. Right. It was investment in critical infrastructure. And that occurred over decades and with a lot of risks and a lot of costs. But I know you've got plenty of things to be doing, plenty of things to go back to on the Hill. Before I let you go, a couple rapid questions. First, what's your favorite model or favorite use case of AI?
- [46:58]
Representative Nick Begich
That's a good question. And I will. I'm going to cheat a little bit.
- [47:01]
Kevin Frazier
Okay.
- [47:01]
Representative Nick Begich
Okay. So you know, I started out using ChatGPT. We still use it in the office. I think it's got some. It's got some good qualities. It's fast, it's responsive when I want. The one I use the most is grok. When I want unfiltered information, quick information, and something that doesn't have a lot of sort of social friction between me and the truth. I'm looking for GROK on complex projects. CLAUDE has been great. So if I need to do web development, believe it or not, I'm a member of Congress who still writes code.
- [47:37]
Kevin Frazier
There we go. There's one. We know of one.
- [47:39]
Representative Nick Begich
I'm sure there's a couple others that least, but I'll use CLAUDE for that. It's a tremendous accelerator for what I'm trying to do. It builds beautifully attractive static HTML react applications on the fly. I wish I had a little bit more token allocation on my subscription, but
- [48:03]
Kevin Frazier
Dario, if we can help a congressman out here, please.
- [48:07]
Representative Nick Begich
But I think it's just I use a different tool for different use cases. They all have the ones that I use anyway. All have great features and they're continuously innovating. Love to see what's happening both at GROK and at Claude with respect to projects and your ability to upload contextual files and information and kind of keep context, retain Context over time. To me, that's very exciting, and it allows you to sort of build more than just one session can provide.
- [48:40]
Kevin Frazier
And now I'll let you play professor.
- [48:42]
Representative Nick Begich
Yeah.
- [48:43]
Kevin Frazier
And you get to assign homework to every member of Congress. It can be a podcast, something to read, or an activity, perhaps building something with Claude. What would your AI homework be for Congress with Claude? Anything.
- [48:57]
Representative Nick Begich
Well, folks who've never touched it, I'd say start with ChatGPT or Grok. Just start asking questions. You know, as we started at the beginning of this discussion, questions lead you to the answers. And I mean, even the most curious person's got questions. So for things that are burning on your mind, go to AI and start asking questions and drill down. We meet with constituents constantly. All day long. I'm meeting with trade groups. I'm meeting with individuals who come from my home state or may come from another state, people who have specific issues, questions. I don't know the answer to all those questions. And so oftentimes, we'll dig in. What can you tell us? What do we know? And so I would say start using it in your daily activities and build from there.
- [49:46]
Kevin Frazier
Build from there. Okay. All right. Not the hardest homework assignment.
- [49:49]
Representative Nick Begich
No, it's pretty straightforward. And that's the beauty of these tools. They've been built to be accessible. I remember when I sat in front of ChatGPT the first time. Okay, how does this work? And I asked one question. Well, that answers that. It's very straightforward.
- [50:03]
Kevin Frazier
Easy, Smeezy.
- [50:04]
Representative Nick Begich
Yeah.
- [50:04]
Kevin Frazier
Well, here may be a toughie. My wife is a very patient woman, and I've yet to take her on a honeymoon. And Alaska is near the top of our list. What is one spot that should be at the top of our list if we do indeed end up going to Alaska?
- [50:19]
Representative Nick Begich
Oh, my gosh. If I tell you one spot, I'm gonna be in trouble.
- [50:22]
Kevin Frazier
Okay, I'll give you. I'll give you. I'll say pick one out of your top 10. Now you have some coverage.
- [50:27]
Representative Nick Begich
I'll give you a few. I'll give you some great spots. I just returned from southeast Alaska. A lot of folks take a cruise through southeast Alaska. They'll start usually in Seattle, and they'll come up to Ketchikan. They'll hit Sitka, Skagway, Juneau. Of course, sometimes they'll go all the way up to Anchorage. There's a lot of great places on the coast, what we call coastal Alaska and southeast, and that Alaskan peninsula that comes down and borders Canada. I have to remind people you know, for me, that's my southern border. Canada. Yeah, but the other southern border. But there's other great places in the state as well that people go up to Fairbanks and they in the wintertime they'll watch the northern lights, which can be incredible. Anchorage is a jumping off point to so many great places on the Kenai Peninsula where you can go fishing, you go deep sea fishing, you can go salmon fishing on the Kenai River. River. There's not a bad place to pick. And if you're really up for an adventure, you can go to utqiagvik, or what's commonly known as Barrow, the northernmost settlement on the North American continent. And check that out. There's some amazing places. It's a big state, two and a half times the size of Texas, with about 750,000 people in it.
- [51:44]
Kevin Frazier
Well, I usually say everything's bigger in Texas, but I guess the exception is Alaska.
- [51:48]
Representative Nick Begich
Exceptions, Alaska.
- [51:49]
Kevin Frazier
Representative Begich, thank you so much for coming on Scaling Laws.
- [51:51]
Representative Nick Begich
Thanks for having me. It's been a great conversation.
- [51:57]
Kevin Frazier
Scaling Laws is a joint production of lawfare and the University of Texas School of Law. You can get an ad free version of this and other Lawfare podcasts by becoming a material subscriber at our website, lawfairmedia.org support. You'll also get access to special events and other content available only to our supporters. Please rate and review us wherever you get your podcasts. Check out our written work@lawfairmedia.org you can also follow us on X and Blue Sky. This podcast was edited by Noam Osband of Goat Rodeo. Our music is from Alibi. As always, thanks for listening. This message comes from Jackson.
- [52:44]
Representative Nick Begich
Taxes aren't something you can only think
- [52:46]
Kevin Frazier
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Representative Nick Begich
our products can make your tax bill a little bit less painful.
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Kevin Frazier
Jackson is short for Jackson Financial, Inc. Jackson National Life Insurance Co. Lansing, Michigan and Jackson National Life Insurance Co. Of
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Representative Nick Begich
New York, Purchase, New York.