On May 4th, the White House Administration, including both President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, met various CEOs of companies currently at the forefront of artificial intelligence innovation. The goal of this meeting, according to the official meeting readout, was to discuss the advancement of AI as well as the associated risks. The CEOs chosen to be a part of this discussion were Sam Altman of OpenAI, Dario Amodei of Anthropic, Satya Nadella of Microsoft and Sundar Pichai of both Alphabet (Google).
The Biden Administration targeted three specific areas in the discussion including the need for transparency from companies in the public and private sector, the necessity to evaluate the security of AI systems, and how to ensure AI systems can be protected from outside attacks. In addition to these concerns, the administration also announced plans to support AI development both financially as well as through regulatory means.
The National Science Foundation announced a plan to fund the creation of seven National AI Research Institutes. The foundation will support these new institutes with $140 million. According to the announcement details, this will raise the number of AI-focused institutes in the US to 25.
There was also an announcement for independent commitment from several AI developers to speak at the AI Village at DEF CON 31 about some of the previously mentioned key concerns regarding transparency and the evaluation of AI. The developers mentioned include Anthropic, Google, Hugging Face, Microsoft, NVIDIA, OpenAI and Stability AI—four of which were a part of the May 4th meeting.
As far regulatory initiatives go, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is planning to release a policy guidance draft that handles how the US government should approach the use of AI systems. It will be released later this summer and will be open to public comment. You can also read a preliminary blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights on the official White House website.
To read more about the meeting in depth, visit the White House website for the readout details as well as additional links for upcoming initiatives for AI in government.