The News
OpenAI published a list of policy proposals on Monday, outlining how US federal and state governments can catalyze the artificial intelligence industry and keep China from taking the lead.
The 15-page document argues that the US should invest heavily in energy and other infrastructure to spur investment in American AI technology, calling for a closer relationship between leading AI companies and the US national security community, among other proposals.
OpenAI also announced a big push to engage officials at the state level to galvanize support for AI initiatives.
Chris Lehane, OpenAI’s head of global policy, said the proposals aimed to shift views around AI policy to one of excitement and national ambition. “This stuff is electricity,” Lehane said in an interview with Semafor. “Do we want to have a mindset that we really want to use this to advance our country on national security and economic issues?”
The blueprint comes amid a coupling of the tech industry and politics, with Elon Musk serving as head of President-elect Donald Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency. Trump has also appointed venture capitalist David Sacks as “AI Czar” and may be pursuing a “Manhattan Project for AI.”
The current boom in AI models requires a massive amount of compute power, both to train the most cutting-edge models and to run those models once they are trained. That has created an insatiable appetite for energy from the largest tech companies and is on a trajectory to strain the country’s aging power grid.
“Since private markets alone may not be enough to pay for the massive amount of needed AI infrastructure, the US government can provide offtake purchase commitments and credit enhancements to encourage infrastructure investment,” the report reads.
Currently, the US is leading the AI lead, but that could change, the report warns, if it does not boost its infrastructure
“If the US doesn’t move fast to channel these resources into projects that support democratic AI ecosystems around the world, the funds will flow to projects backed and shaped by the CCP [Communist Party of China],” the document says.
OpenAI is also targeting state governments around the country in a new initiative called Innovating for America, which will kick off with a planned event in Washington, DC, later this month hosted by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
Reed’s view
OpenAI’s policy proposals make sense on a practical level. There’s very little potential downside to modernizing the country’s energy grid and production capacity, for instance. Even if we don’t achieve “artificial general intelligence,” the economic benefits are black and white.
But OpenAI and other AI companies have a tough fight ahead of them. A non-trivial percentage of the population believes the development of AI is a bad idea, and it will be a challenge to convince the majority of the country that this is the new space race and American taxpayers need to get behind it.