President Donald Trump’s cost-cutting measures to decrease the federal budget have already been backfiring. Federal workers are being fired and rehired. Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency has been deemed an utter failure as well.
And now, the United States’ lead in AI technologies and Trump’s own policy proposal to boost AI are under threat due to Trump’s anti-science agenda, The Guardian reports.
Last month, the Trump administration released its “AI Action Plan,” a policy guideline on how the country can retain its edge on AI over rivals like China. But with no research funding available, the plan won’t amount to much, experts told The Guardian.
National Institute of Health’s head of neural computation and behavior, Mark Histed, told The Guardian that while the effects of the cuts may not be apparent within the next two years, “the whole ecosystem that we have built around AI, that has been created by federal support,” could soon be seriously undermined.
In other words, the Trump administration’s massive underfunding of science could greatly hamper its goal of “winning the AI race,” allowing its adversaries to gain the upper hand when it comes to cutting-edge AI research.
Histed pointed out that many of the flagstone projects in AI, such as computer vision for autonomous vehicles and AlphaFold, a protein modeling app developed by Google, started and relied on federal funding.
Cuts to other disciplines, such as neuroscience, would adversely impact the advancement of AI technologies due to the cross-fertilization and exchange of ideas between fields, he argued.
“We’re just at the beginning of understanding how networks of connected neurons create functions like memory and cognition,” he said. “And if you look at a machine learning network or an AI network, that is also the case.”
The other problem with cutting science research is that sought-after AI talent is leaving academia for Silicon Valley, especially if there are zero funds for education and research at universities.
“We train lots and lots and lots of people in neuroscience and related fields that are going directly to these tech companies,” Histed said. “There’s tons of overlap. All the people who are leading the technical side of the AI revolution have had contact with the academic world that trained them and is supported by US federal funding.”
Without education funding, AI companies could soon run out of the talent they need to progress.
“One of the big ways in which tech companies benefit from universities is that we train students, right?” University of Chicago computer science professor Rebecca Willett told the newspaper, pointing out that “universities are playing an essential role that’s important to industry.”
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