\n<\/p>\n
The Trump administration released \u201cAmerica\u2019s AI Action Plan\u201d last month with the goal of expanding US dominance when it comes to AI in order to maintain a global edge, especially over China.<\/p>\n
But Donald Trump\u2019s cuts to scientific research funding through federal agencies \u2013 including the National Intitute Health, the National Science Foundation, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and Nasa \u2013 will undermine that goal and threaten the research environment that fostered the foundations of AI, experts in the field said.<\/p>\n
Mark Histed, chief of the unit on neural computation and behavior at NIH, said that while the effects of funding cuts on AI might not be obvious in the next year or two, they threaten \u201cthe whole ecosystem that we have built around AI, that has been created by federal support\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat I see is an ecosystem, right? I see multiple different disciplines contributing different aspects to this process. I see academia playing a key role and industry playing a key role. And so as we look forward and we think about trying to advance AI, we need to be supporting that entire ecosystem,\u201d Rebecca Willett, a computer science professor at the University of Chicago and faculty director of AI at the Data Science Institute, explained, echoing Histed.<\/p>\n
Histed and Willett both believe that AI simply would not exist in its current form without federally funded research, and offered a variety of AI technologies and companies that owe their development to federal funding.<\/p>\n
For example, self-driving cars rely on computer vision technology \u2013 federal funding has supported its development since the 1980s. Computer vision is the foundation for the vast majority of face and image recognition technologies. AlphaFold, which uses AI to help discover new medications, and Anthropic, which improves AI safety, including for the US Department of Defense, also exists thanks to federal support.<\/p>\n
AI research often takes cues from other realms of science, which in turn can help foster AI, so cuts to other disciplines will affect the intelligence\u2019s development. Histed points to the overlap between his field of neuroscience and AI.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re just at the beginning of understanding how networks of connected neurons create functions like memory and cognition. And if you look at a machine learning network or an AI network, that is also the case,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Histed pointed out that federally funded research that brings these disciplines together has led to Nobel prize-winning work. Geoffrey Hinton and John Hopfield won the 2024 Nobel prize in physics for their work at the intersection of neuroscience and AI, and received support from the NSF.<\/p>\n
Trump\u2019s plan could also pose a threat to AI safety, which is essential to ensuring that AI is not only effective but that it operates within the boundaries of the law. The plan includes provisions to revise guidelines at the National Institute of Standards and Technology \u201cto eliminate references to misinformation, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, and climate change\u201d. These are three of the most controversial aspects of AI, which has been demonstrated to show gender and racial bias in a variety of applications, including face recognition technology and popular applications like ChatGPT.<\/p>\n
A recent study found that ChatGPT advises women to ask for less money than men when prompted for advice about salary expectations. Histed says that the field of AI safety is also closely linked with neuroscience, because understanding how human neural networks create bias can also help us understand how AI networks create bias.<\/p>\n
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Sign up to This Week in Trumpland<\/span><\/p>\n A deep dive into the policies, controversies and oddities surrounding the Trump administration<\/p>\n Privacy Notice: <\/strong>Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.<\/span><\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n Trump\u2019s plan also calls for less red tape when it comes to building AI datacentres that can suck up huge amounts of energy. Willett said it was true that large-scale machine learning systems \u201ccome at an enormous cost. It\u2019s a huge amount of energy, a huge amount of cooling.\u201d<\/p>\n But, she added, AI companies themselves should still want to reduce those costs regardless of what Trump\u2019s plan says.<\/p>\n \u201cNot only do they have environmental impacts, but it\u2019s expensive for the companies that are running these systems. And so I think across the AI community, people are invested in trying to make these systems more efficient,\u201d Willett said.<\/p>\n Willett and Histed both say that the AI community will be under threat in the coming years if the federal government no longer funds their training at universities. Histed noted that the federally funded \u201ctalent pipeline\u201d is \u201cincredibly important\u201d, adding \u201cwe train lots and lots and lots of people in neuroscience and related fields that are going directly to these tech companies. There\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n \u201cOne of the big ways in which tech companies benefit from universities is that we train students, right?\u201d Willett said. \u201cAnd so they walk into these companies with cutting-edge skills that these companies need. And so right off the bat, I think universities are playing an essential role that\u2019s important to industry.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Trump administration released \u201cAmerica\u2019s AI Action Plan\u201d last month with the goal of expanding US dominance when it comes to AI in order to maintain a global edge, especially over China. But Donald Trump\u2019s cuts to scientific research funding through federal agencies \u2013 including the National Intitute Health, the National Science Foundation, the Defense<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":15831,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[58],"tags":[919,794,403,562,1436,3141,516,773,81],"class_list":{"0":"post-15830","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science","8":"tag-action","9":"tag-administration","10":"tag-administrations","11":"tag-cuts","12":"tag-plan","13":"tag-research","14":"tag-science","15":"tag-threaten","16":"tag-trump"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15830","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15830"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15830\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/15831"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15830"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15830"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15830"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}