I have not had personal experience with CAISI. I have not talked to them. I have talked to many people around Yoshua Bengio at Mila and his group. He is one of the godfathers of AI. These are the people I have the most experience with.
Generally, it is very important to have some amount of technical capability that can give non-partisan advice to governments. This is a very important function. It's also very important to understand that a lot of these institutions, in a sense, through no fault of their own, are often corrupted by business interests.
Many of the people who work at these companies or at these institutions have very lucrative offers from these kinds of companies and often have their identity tied to technology being good. On the other hand, there are many people whose identity is tied to technology not being good. We don't want either of these things. What we want is a balanced understanding of how we can mitigate the risks that are truly unacceptable, while also benefiting from the ones that we can't mitigate. This is a hard tightrope to balance, but it's important to make this the clear mandate.