AI Leaders Press Advantage With Congress as China Tensions Rise (nytimes.com) 14
Silicon Valley chiefs are swarming the Capitol to try to sway lawmakers on the dangers of falling behind in the AI race. From a report: In recent weeks, American lawmakers have moved to ban the Chinese-owned app TikTok. President Biden reinforced his commitment to overcome China's rise in tech. And the Chinese government added chips from Intel and AMD to a blacklist of imports. Now, as the tech and economic cold war between the United States and China accelerates, Silicon Valley's leaders are capitalizing on the strife with a lobbying push for their interests in another promising field of technology: artificial intelligence.
On May 1, more than 100 tech chiefs and investors, including Alex Karp, the head of the defense contractor Palantir, and Roelof Botha, the managing partner of the venture capital firm Sequoia Capital, will come to Washington for a daylong conference and private dinner focused on drumming up more hawkishness toward China's progress in A.I. Dozens of lawmakers, including Speaker Mike Johnson, Republican of Louisiana, will also attend the event, the Hill & Valley Forum, which will include fireside chats and keynote discussions with members of a new House A.I. task force.
Tech executives plan to use the event to directly lobby against A.I. regulations that they consider onerous, as well as ask for more government spending on the technology and research to support its development. They also plan to ask to relax immigration restrictions to bring more A.I. experts to the United States. The event highlights an unusual area of agreement between Washington and Silicon Valley, which have long clashed on topics like data privacy, children's online protections and even China.
On May 1, more than 100 tech chiefs and investors, including Alex Karp, the head of the defense contractor Palantir, and Roelof Botha, the managing partner of the venture capital firm Sequoia Capital, will come to Washington for a daylong conference and private dinner focused on drumming up more hawkishness toward China's progress in A.I. Dozens of lawmakers, including Speaker Mike Johnson, Republican of Louisiana, will also attend the event, the Hill & Valley Forum, which will include fireside chats and keynote discussions with members of a new House A.I. task force.
Tech executives plan to use the event to directly lobby against A.I. regulations that they consider onerous, as well as ask for more government spending on the technology and research to support its development. They also plan to ask to relax immigration restrictions to bring more A.I. experts to the United States. The event highlights an unusual area of agreement between Washington and Silicon Valley, which have long clashed on topics like data privacy, children's online protections and even China.
Oh, enough of the alleged AI gibberish (Score:2, Interesting)
>In recent weeks, American lawmakers have moved to ban the Chinese-owned app TikTok.
Let's rephrase that. "In recent months, American lawmakers have tried to confiscate TikTok for American billionaires".
>lobby against A.I. regulations that they consider onerous
They can't possibly consider any AI regulations onerous until someone manages to come up with AI, which is always 20 years from now.
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...i'd -1 this if i had any mod points left...
That's not how it's supposed to work here. If you think someone said something stupid, hit that "Reply to This" link and throw in your own $0.02. It's a discussion, not a popularity contest.
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They did not express an opinion on AI one way or the other, just merely reminded you of the moderation guidelines. For all you know they agree with you.
Sir, We cannot allow a chatbot gap...! (Score:1, Interesting)
I was really hoping we'd withdraw head from ass (Score:1)
Instead, we're going to flush money down the drain of LLMs. Instead of spending the money on countermeasures to hypersonic missiles or something useful like that.
I worked a decade ago on a military project to get LLMs to do some basic maintenance for satellite rigs while disconnected out in the field. Conceptually, it could watch for basic log file type errors - peripheral disconnected, network down, whatever - and take responsive measures to fix. It never came to fruition, mainly over reliability conce
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Instead of spending the money on countermeasures to hypersonic missiles or something useful like that.
I wouldn't exactly consider a literal arms race to be the best use of resources, either. How about we start manufacturing more EV chargers here in the USA as a start. Ever looked closely at a Tesla Supercharger? Ones near me are all made in Shanghai.
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When your enemy has a weapon that invalidates your aircraft carriers and pretty much your whole arsenal, you have two choices - deterrence or defense. Well, you have a third one. It's called surrender.
I'm presuming no one wants to surrender to Putin or Xi.
China is already knee capped (Score:2)
Of course. Grifters gotta grift (Score:2)
It is truly amazing how all these multi-billion dollar private companies can't survive one day without begging the taxpayers for money. We saw the same thing with covid where they cried poor because they couldn't be bothered to have a six month emergency fund built up.
How about they go to the market and get their money there rather than expecting taxpayers to prop up their failing companies.
GIMME GIMME GIMME!!! (Score:2)
Tech executives plan to use the event to directly lobby against A.I. regulations that they consider onerous, as well as ask for more government spending on the technology and research to support its development. They also plan to ask to relax immigration restrictions to bring more A.I. experts to the United States.
And where will they get these AI experts? China perhaps?
Dear US Government,
Please to be regulating anybody but us. Also please to be handing us lots and lots of money to research this special new form of technological fairy dust known as AI. Also, also, please to be allowing us to import any talent we may need so that we can avoid paying any US citizens for work we need done in order to generate more profits. Oh, wait, can you just maybe hand us money that we can call profit? That'd be sweet.
Signed,
Tech-b