Matt O’Brien and Ali Swenson, Associated Press
The artificial intelligence agenda, which began to coalesce on the Silicon Valley billionaires podcast, is now built on US policy as President Donald Trump leaned towards the ideas of engineers who supported the campaign.
Trump on Wednesday is set to reveal the “AI Action Plan” he ordered after returning to the White House in January. He gave President Joe Biden’s signature AI Guardrails to six months of tech advisors to devise a new AI policy after revoking President Joe Biden’s first day of taking office.
The unveiling ceremony is co-hosted by the Bipartisan Hill and Valley Forum and the All-in-Podcast, a business and technology show hosted by four high-tech investors and entrepreneurs, including Trump’s AI Czar and David Sacks.
The plan and associated executive orders are expected to include the familiar high-technology pitch. This includes accelerating the overseas sales of AI technology and facilitating the construction of energy-hungry data center buildings needed to form and execute AI products.
It could also include some of the AI culture war preconceived notions of a circle of venture capitalists who supported Trump last year.
Block “awake AI” from high-tech contractors
Countering the liberal bias seen in AI chatbots like ChatGpt and Google’s Gemini has long been the rallying point for Trump’s biggest supporters in the tech industry.
Sacks, a former PayPal executive and now Trump’s top AI advisor, has been criticizing Woke Ai for over a year, fueling Google’s February 2024 deployment of AI image generators.
“AI is programmed with diversity and inclusion and cannot provide accurate answers,” Sachs said at the time. Google quickly fixed that tool, but the “Black George Washington” moment remained a parable of the issue of AI political bias filmed by X-owner Elon Musk, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, vice president JD Vance and Republican lawmakers.
The administration’s latest push for “Woke AI” comes a week after it announced a new $200 million contract with four major AI companies, including Google, to address “critical national security challenges.”
Also, Musk’s Xai received one of the contracts, which has been marketed as an alternative to the “Woke AI” company. The company faces its own challenges. Earlier this month, Xai had to scramble to delete posts created by the Grok chatbot, which created anti-Semitic comments and praised Adolf Hitler.
Allowing to streamline AI data centers
Trump combines his own push and the vast amount of power needs of AI to utilize US energy sources such as gas, coal and nuclear.
“We want what we’re aiming for, meaning that America’s energy needs and needs to rise,” said Michael Kratzos, director of science and technology policy at the White House, in a video posted Tuesday.
Many tech giants are already on track to build new data centers in the US and around the world. Openai announced this week that it has turned on the first phase of its large data center complex in Abilene, Texas. Major projects are also underway for Amazon, Microsoft, Meta and Xai.
The high-tech industry is pushing for easy permit rules for connecting computing facilities to electricity, but the AI building boom has also contributed to the surge in fossil fuel production, which contributes to global warming.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Tuesday called on the world’s leading tech companies to fully generate electricity in data centres along with renewable energy by 2030.
“A typical AI data center eats as much electricity as 100,000 homes,” Guterres said. “By 2030, data centers could consume as much power as everything we do today.”
A new approach to AI export?
Under Republican and Democrat administrations, reducing the export of certain technologies to China and other enemies for national security reasons has long been a White House policy.
However, many in the tech industry have argued that Biden was too far away at the end of his term in an attempt to limit the export of special AI computer chips to more than 100 other countries, including close relatives.
Part of the Biden administration’s motivation was to stop China from acquiring coveted AI chips in third-party locations such as Southeast Asia and the Middle East, but critics said it would encourage more countries to rely on China’s burgeoning AI industry instead of the US as technology suppliers.
It is still unknown that the Trump administration aims to accelerate the export of US AI technology while countering China’s AI ambitions. California chip makers Nvidia and AMD announced last week that they had received approval from the Trump administration to sell some of the advanced computer chips used to develop artificial intelligence to China.
AMD CEO Lisa Su is one of the guests scheduled to attend Trump’s event on Wednesday.
Those who benefit from Trump’s AI Action Plan
There is a keen debate even among the influential venture capitalists who have discussed it on their favourite medium, the podcast, about how to regulate AI.
While some Trump supporters, particularly Andreesen, have advocated a “acceleratorist” approach aimed at speeding up AI advancement with minimal regulations, Sachs describes himself as taking the middle road of technorealism.
“Technology is going to happen. Trying to stop it is like ordering the tide to stop, or someone else will,” Sachs said on his all-in-podcast.
On Tuesday, 95 groups, including unions, parent groups, environmental justice organisations and privacy advocates, opposed Trump’s embrace of industry-led AI policies and signed a resolution calling for a “people AI action plan” that “will come first and foremost for Americans.”
Amba Kak, co-executive director of the AI Now Institute, said it led the effort, saying the coalition expects Trump’s plans to be “right from the mouth of big technology.”
“Every time we say, “What about our work, the air, the water, the kids?” They’re going to say, “But what about China?” She said on a phone call with a reporter on Tuesday. She rejected the White House claim that the industry is overregulated and said Americans should fight to maintain “baseline protection for the public” as AI technology advances.
Seung Min Kim, writer for the Associated Press in Washington, contributed to this report.
