This new AI vitality race is inseparable from the positioning of AI as important for nationwide safety and US competitiveness with China. OpenAI laid out its place in a weblog put up in October, writing, “AI is a transformational know-how that can be utilized to strengthen democratic values or to undermine them. That’s why we consider democracies ought to proceed to take the lead in AI improvement.” Then in December, the corporate went a step additional and reversed its coverage in opposition to working with the army, announcing it might develop AI fashions with the defense-tech firm Anduril to assist take down drones round army bases.
That very same month, Sam Altman mentioned throughout an interview with The Free Press that the Biden administration was “not that efficient” in shepherding AI: “The issues that I believe ought to have been the administration’s priorities, and I hope would be the subsequent administration’s priorities, are constructing out huge AI infrastructure within the US, having a provide chain within the US, issues like that.”
That characterization glosses over the CHIPS Act, a $52 billion stimulus to the home chips business that’s, a minimum of on paper, aligned with Altman’s imaginative and prescient. (It additionally preceded an govt order Biden issued simply final week, to lease federal land to host the kind of gigawatt-scale information facilities that Altman had been asking for.)
Deliberately or not, Altman’s posture aligned him with the rising camaraderie between President Trump and Silicon Valley. Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Sundar Pichai all sat immediately behind Trump’s household on the inauguration on Monday, and Altman additionally attended. Lots of them had additionally made sizable donations to Trump’s inaugural fund, with Altman personally throwing in $1 million.
It’s simple to view the inauguration as proof that these tech leaders are aligned with one another, and with different gamers in Trump’s orbit. However there are nonetheless some key dividing traces that will probably be price watching. Notably, there’s the conflict over H-1B visas, which permit many noncitizen AI researchers to work within the US. Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy (who’s, as of this week, no longer part of the so-called Division of Authorities Effectivity) have been pushing for that visa program to be expanded. This sparked backlash from some allies of the Trump administration, maybe most loudly Steve Bannon.
One other fault line is the battle between open- and closed-source AI. Google and OpenAI forestall anybody from understanding precisely what’s of their strongest fashions, typically arguing that this retains them from getting used improperly by dangerous actors. Musk has sued OpenAI and Microsoft over the difficulty, alleging that closed-source fashions are antithetical to OpenAI’s hybrid nonprofit construction. Meta, whose Llama model is open-source, just lately sided with Musk in that lawsuit. Enterprise capitalist and Trump ally Marc Andreessen echoed these criticisms of OpenAI on X simply hours after the inauguration. (Andreessen has additionally said that making AI fashions open-source “makes overbearing laws pointless.”)
Lastly, there are the battles over bias and free speech. The vastly totally different approaches that social media corporations have taken to moderating content material—together with Meta’s current announcement that it might finish its US fact-checking program—increase questions on whether or not the way in which AI fashions are moderated will proceed to splinter too. Musk has lamented what he calls the “wokeness” of many main fashions, and Andreessen mentioned on Tuesday that “Chinese language LLMs are a lot much less censored than American LLMs” (although that’s not fairly true, on condition that many Chinese language AI fashions have government-mandated censorship in place that forbids explicit matters). Altman has been extra equivocal: “No two individuals are ever going to agree that one system is completely unbiased,” he instructed The Free Press.
It’s solely the beginning of a brand new period in Washington, however the White Home has been busy. It has repealed many govt orders signed by President Biden, together with the landmark order on AI that imposed guidelines for presidency use of the know-how (whereas it seems to have stored Biden’s order on leasing land for extra information facilities). Altman is busy as effectively. OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank reportedly plan to spend as much as $500 billion on a three way partnership for brand spanking new information facilities; the venture was introduced by President Trump, with Altman standing alongside. And in line with Axios, Altman will even be a part of a closed-door briefing with authorities officers on January 30, reportedly about OpenAI’s improvement of a robust new AI agent.
