Latest news with #AmericanAI
USA Today
16-02-2025
- Business
- USA Today
Trump and Vance get it. US can use AI to help Americans and the world flourish.
John Tillman Opinion contributor Is artificial intelligence good or evil? That is the question I had to answer a few years ago. I was speaking on a panel, and AI had just burst onto the scene so interest was high. Surely, I thought, won't everyone agree that AI is good? I couldn't have been more wrong. I was the only one who made a forceful defense of this technology, arguing that it could ensure American economic dominance and uplift the less fortunate by disrupting elite institutions and industries. Everyone else said the opposite − that AI threatened the vulnerable and could upend America as we know it. Even more shocking: The audience largely sided with the naysayers. I walked away from that panel worried that America would squander its chance to unleash AI-driven opportunity. My fears were confirmed as the Biden-Harris administration sought to control AI, laying the legal groundwork to strangle it with regulation. Need a break? Play the USA TODAY Daily Crossword Puzzle. Opinion:AI companies flaunt their theft. News media has to fight back – so we're suing. While I shared widespread concerns about AI's potential for abuse, I had far more belief in the American people's ability to refine that technology and direct it toward its highest and most humane use. But that can't happen so long as government stokes panic about AI and prevents it from developing in a free and fair market. Finally, we have a president and vice president who agree that AI is good − who recognize that America needs AI and needs to lead the world in development of the technology. Vance speech addresses US approach to AI The clearest proof is Vice President JD Vance's speech on artificial intelligence last week in Europe, which instantly became the AI policy shot heard 'round the world. The vice president declared that, unlike the last presidential administration, America now rejects the idea that government should direct AI's development. He said that 'excessive regulation' of AI would 'kill a transformative industry just as it's taking off.' Instead, Vance said, we need 'pro-growth AI policies' that enable this technology to become 'a potent tool for job creation' and human flourishing in the United States. In short, Vance said, American AI will be 'the gold standard worldwide,' proving what this technology is truly capable of while uplifting our people in extraordinary, even unimaginable ways. Opinion:Trump is right to invest in AI development. But is it too late to beat China? Thankfully, President Donald Trump has already proved that this isn't just rhetoric. He repealed Joe Biden's anti-AI policies on the first day of his administration, and in his first month, he has been a loud and proud cheerleader of American AI. But Vance didn't just say that America needs AI and needs to lead in AI. He also said that AI needs America − that our philosophy of freedom must guide the global development of this cutting-edge tool. This is the meaning of the vice president's declaration that 'AI must remain free from ideological bias and that American AI will not be co-opted into a tool for authoritarian censorship.' He's right: AI must be grounded in the right ideals, like freedom of speech, freedom of religion and freedom to pursue happiness in a system of equal opportunity. China uses AI for control and oppression That's a stark contrast with Chinese AI, which might be technologically advanced but is morally stunted, as it's already used to censor topics the Chinese Communist Party finds objectionable while enabling that regime's social and economic oppression. China is proving that AI can be evil. But it doesn't mean AI is inherently evil, and America can prove that this technology's capacity for good is far greater. By taking the political and legal shackles off AI, Trump and Vance are empowering the American people to move AI in the best possible direction. Our companies will innovate even faster because they no longer fear being dominated by government. Our citizens will guide that innovation, demanding that AI developers not only create incredible products, but also do so on a principled basis. And other countries will follow our lead, seeing that America's market-driven approach to AI is superior in every way. Donald Trump and JD Vance deserve praise for seeing this promise and empowering America to seize the opportunity. If only we'd had leaders who recognized the truth several years ago, when I was asked if this technology is good or evil. American AI would be even more advanced, uplifting more people from all walks of life. Now, at last, we'll start to unleash the incredible potential of artificial intelligence, and for the benefit of all. John Tillman is CEO of the American Culture Project.
Yahoo
28-01-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
OpenAI Developer Seethes at Success of DeepSeek
DeepSeek's new chain-of-thought AI model has Silicon Valley developers seething that a startup from — gasp — China could build something just as good, if not better, than what they've come up with, for a fraction of the cost and with far superior energy efficiency. Exhibit A: OpenAI programmer Steven Heidel, who couldn't help injecting some old-fashioned China bashing to distract from the fact that his company just got smoked in a race it had a several year and multibillion dollar head-start in. "Americans sure love giving their data away to the CCP in exchange for free stuff," Heidel wrote on X, referring to the Communist Party of China. Following overwhelming backlash, his tweet was appended with a community note: "DeepSeek can be run locally without an internet connection, unlike OpenAI's models." This is true. DeepSeek's r1 model is open-source, totally free, and if you're concerned about your privacy, you can download and run all 404 gigs of it on your own rig. Because it's a chain-of-thought model, anyone can see how the AI "thinks," which goes a long way as far as trust. (After the community note dunk, Heidel followed up with a post urging users to only use the DeepSeek model locally.) Needless to say, to smear the AI model, whose underlying code is free for anyone to poke around in, as some sort of Chinese spyware is really rich coming from someone who works at OpenAI, a company that quickly ditched its noble, non-profit and open-source beginnings as soon as it got a taste of money. Today, it's firmly for-profit and closed-source. It'd be remiss to brush aside privacy concerns surrounding Chinese platforms, and indeed the censorship present in the app version of DeepSeek. But OpenAI's data ethics track record isn't exactly squeaky clean, either. It trained its AI model by devouring everyone's data on the surface web without ever stopping to ask permission. It and its CEO Sam Altman have also invested in a number of companies whose commitment to privacy is questionable. Plus, pretty much every outfit in Silicon Valley pawns off their customer's data to data brokers, who in turn sell that information to thousands of other companies so they can barrage you with ads — and most perniciously, to government agencies for surveillance purposes. To that end, it might be worth mentioning that OpenAI appointed a former National Security Administration director to its board — a move that Edward Snowden blasted as a "calculated betrayal of the rights of every person on earth." Of course, Heidel isn't alone. Just days before his faux-pas, Neal Khosla, CEO of the AI-powered health clinic Curai, called DeepSeek a "CCP state psyop" and an act of "economic warfare to make American AI unprofitable." (Counterpoint: American AI is why American AI is unprofitable.) In reality, the US has been waging plenty of economic warfare on that front, including implementing export controls in 2023 that effectively banned advanced US-made AI chips, including those made by Nvidia, from entering China. Ironically, that pressure may have pushed Chinese developers to make its models more efficient with less hardware, while American competitors gluttonously relied on scaling up their datacenters comprising literal billions of dollars worth of GPUs to make gains. That the immediate response of Silicon Valley to DeepSeek's achievements is to link it with CCP conspiracies is a sign of deep-seated insecurity, and — let's face it — racism. The same anti-Chinese rhetoric, similarly under the guise of protecting Americans' privacy, fueled the push for the (now-suspended) ban on TikTok. "I think if any of these AI bros were remotely serious about using this technology to improve society they'd be excited at the idea of someone managing to run laps around them for 1/10th the computing power but instead they are seething, sinophobically," wrote a Bluesky user. More on AI: Mega-Hyped Chinese AI App DeepSeek Says It's Been Hit by "Large-Scale Malicious Attacks"
