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AI Technology

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.

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AI Leaders Press Advantage With Congress as China Tensions Rise

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  • >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.

    • ...i'd -1 this if i had any mod points left...
      • ...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.

  • If the private sector was only fast enough linking AI and Crypto Mining fraud would really be a victimless crime.
  • 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

    • 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.

      • Since any likely countermeasures to hypersonic missiles would likely require giant frickin' laser beams, which in turn will require amazing new forms of storage and rapid transfer of electrical energy, maybe we can kill two birds (one almost literally) with one stone.
      • by HBI ( 10338492 )

        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.

  • The chip import ban will force them to use last year's older chips, taking double or even 10x the time to do LLM training. It is almost like in the Three Body Problem when the Trisolarans knee capped Earth's quantum research. Also private equity is jumping at everything AI related. Do not give these guys any government money, instead spend that money to put barge-guards around bridges.
  • as well as ask for more government spending on the technology and research to support its development.

    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.
  • 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

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