The Trump administration's recently unveiled AI Action Plan marks a significant departure from the cautious approach of former President Biden, embracing a full-throttle strategy to bolster AI infrastructure, deregulate tech companies, and counter China's growing influence in the AI sphere. This ambitious blueprint aims to spark a new era of human flourishing by investing billions of taxpayer dollars in data centers, upskilling workers, and creating jobs in the AI sector. But will this aggressive push for progress come at the expense of environmental protections and national security?
At the heart of Trump's AI Action Plan is a relentless drive for progress, with the administration downplaying potential AI risks in favor of building out data centers to fuel the AI industry. This includes utilizing federal lands and keeping them powered during critical energy grid periods. However, the plan's success hinges on its execution, which remains a work in progress.
One of the most striking aspects of the AI Action Plan is its focus on protecting free speech and American values by eliminating references to misinformation, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), and climate change from federal risk-assessment frameworks. The plan emphasizes the importance of building AI systems that prioritize freedom of speech and expression, without government interference.
To achieve this, the plan calls for updating federal procurement guidelines to ensure the government only contracts with large language model developers who can guarantee their systems are objective and free from ideological bias. This raises questions about how the government plans to evaluate models based on neutrality, as achieving objectivity in AI remains a complex and elusive goal.
Trump's AI Action Plan also aims to encourage the development and adoption of open AI models, which are freely available online and created with American values in mind. This move appears to be a response to the rising prominence of open AI models from Chinese AI labs. To support this initiative, Trump plans to ensure that startups and researchers working on open models have access to large computing clusters, which are typically reserved for tech companies with million- or billion-dollar contracts.
Despite its focus on open AI, the plan does include provisions to appease the AI safety community. It calls for launching a federal technological development program to research AI interpretability, control systems, and adversarial robustness. Additionally, federal agencies, including the Department of Defense and Department of Energy, are instructed to host hackathons to test their AI systems for security vulnerabilities.
A key component of Trump's AI Action Plan is its focus on national security, with the term mentioned 23 times throughout the document. The plan emphasizes integrating AI into the U.S. defense and intelligence apparatus, building AI data centers for the Department of Defense, and guarding against foreign threats. Federal agencies are tasked with collecting intelligence on foreign AI projects that could threaten American national security and evaluating the level of AI adoption among America's adversaries.
In conclusion, Trump's AI Action Plan represents a bold and ambitious move to propel the United States to the forefront of the global AI race. However, this aggressive approach raises concerns about potential environmental and national security risks, as well as the plan's ability to achieve its lofty goals. As the nation hurtles towards a future dominated by AI, it remains to be seen whether Trump's gamble will pay off or result in unforeseen consequences.