11 ms·

National Artificial Intelligence Initiative

202 points by KoftaBob 5y ago

jschveibinz 5y ago
I love the concept. The White House has been lacking any form of intelligence for quite some time, so this is a step in the right direction.
- iseanstevens 5y ago
  ++
- xpe 5y ago
  > The White House has been lacking any form of intelligence This is exaggerated. What do you mean?
  - KoftaBob 5y ago
    It sounds like they’re making a joke about the intelligence of past presidents.
    - commandlinefan 5y ago
      No need to limit yourself to the past.
- thepasswordis 5y ago
  This initiative was started under a previous administration. https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/ai/ https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/ai/
- zedshawmotherfu 5y ago
  And it's still devoid of it. Nothing to see here, other than performing pedantic prose.
rexreed 5y ago
[*] Re-launches. The White House has had an AI.Gov site for a few years, operated by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. For a short while during the transition, the AI.Gov site redirected to a subsite managed by NIST, but now it is back to having a self-managed site. You can see the old AI.Gov site here: https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/ai/ https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/ai/ The HN entry: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19446726 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19446726
- eplanit 5y ago
  But now that it's associated with Biden, it's really, really wonderful!
  - rwcarlsen 5y ago
    Despite the sarcasm, I think your comment makes a really good point. People have lenses and biases that really make it difficult to objectively evaluate the actions of politicians/administrations independent of their like for the individuals in charge and other unrelated actions said politicians may have done.
    - sharker8 5y ago
      Politicians deserve to be evaluated for their body of work and history which includes statements and actions which may cause one to either like or dislike them.
      - rwcarlsen 5y ago
        I wasn't commenting on evaluating politicians. I was commenting on evaluating things they are involved with and do.
        sharker8 5y ago
        They get involved in certain things by being who they are. And they avoid other things and other people by being themselves.
troelsSteegin 5y ago
It's from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) [0]. The audience for OSTP is cross-Federal, and the contributing agency scope for this site is wide. The Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) [1] used to do this kind of technology policy work too. OTA served US Congress, is no more, and may or may not be worthing bringing back [2]. Personally, I like seeing deep (no pun intended) technology expertise at work in US government. The Michael Lewis book "The Fifth Risk" was hagiographic that way. [0] https://www.whitehouse.gov/ostp/ https://www.whitehouse.gov/ostp/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Technology_Assessment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Technology_Assessmen... [2] https://www.brookings.edu/research/it-is-time-to-restore-the-us-office-of-technology-assessment/ https://www.brookings.edu/research/it-is-time-to-restore-the...
klmadfejno 5y ago
When I opened the page I was disappointed to not see a picture of someone using confusing holographic ui's to navigate some sort of graph. Scrolling down, I see my fears were unnecessary. AI == holographic UI. The girl in Education and Training appears to have no less than 16 unique holographic objects surrounding her. On the hand, the applications girl has a far simpler visual interface, but appears to require advanced spiderman hand gesture to properly interact with it.
- sergiomattei 5y ago
  What's so wrong about it? It's ugly, but it's just a graphic. It's not like it's going to forever taint their research.
  - nerbert 5y ago
    It’s a metaphor. Beautiful metaphor.
  - klmadfejno 5y ago
    I think it's charming personally.
  - ineedasername 5y ago
    It's not that it's ugly-- it looks fine. It's just that it conveys no information about what it's supposed to represent.
- relativeadv 5y ago
  ok
- dash2 5y ago
  Unfortunately AI has not yet advanced enough to remove the blocky gif artifacts when you zoom in on ET girl.
- coding123 5y ago
  Well, I was about to say - the applications girl is going to click on, what exactly, parts of the brain? Then there are these images like "$" or "mobile phone" or "chat"... If I was presented that interface, I mean what am I expected to get if I click on the Amygdala - like some kind of bitcoin pay out?
ape4 5y ago
Big "Back to Top" button is big
- josefresco 5y ago
  And it's on the left. I kind of like it.
- xpe 5y ago
  Commentary about minutiae of the layout is uninteresting in my POV and per HN guidelines. Please help keep HN interesting.
mark_l_watson 5y ago
A good thing, I suppose. I read through the first linked paper and there was so much boilerplate. Someone needs to train a transformer model to remove boilerplate for casual reading. I have to love the domain AI.gov, I wish I owned something similar. I do have M-x-AI.com, but that is really only meaningful to Emacs users, right over the head of vim users.
- rsfern 5y ago
  Do you mean this OSTP report on cloud computing? Personally I think it’s pretty straight to the point for a government report like this. There’s like half a page introduction and it’s straight to specific recommendations and goals. They even put the core idea for each point in bold... [pdf]: https://www.nitrd.gov/pubs/Recommendations-Cloud-AI-RD-Nov2020.pdf https://www.nitrd.gov/pubs/Recommendations-Cloud-AI-RD-Nov20...
  - mark_l_watson 5y ago
    That was the paper. I agree with you that for government reports, it is not too verbose, I was just wishing that someone else would do the work of training a model to summarize government reports.
    - panzagl 5y ago
      A lot of US government boilerplate is to document authority, responsibility and jurisdiction- basically it's "Why we're qualified to spend the taxpayer's money doing this, who told us to do it, and why it's necessary".
aboringusername 5y ago
I am hoping in the near term future we can have serious conversations about the usage of AI and where it stands legally, because from what I see in 2021 is an essential freeforall (clearview AI being one example). Can anyone link to me a comprehensive set of rules/laws governing AI, at all, in any country on earth? I assume it's now legal to collect whatever data you like, as much of it as you wish, and even if it leaks online (as the recent FB data breach did), you're "a-okay". Cool, so now I know PII is a fair game to collect, sell, profile, and use as I please, any actual real-world human impact from this (deaths, scams, anything in between) is not my problem. I know for a fact I won't be prosecuted, fined or challenged in any way (provided I'm Mark Zuckerberg and appease my overlords), anyone insignificant will get the book thrown at them as is typical. We seem to have a real issue with getting to grips with this new technology and how it can easily be used in both good ways to enhance industries but also work against humans (racial bias/profiling for example). I honestly am amazed "AI" is even legal today, it should be explicitly banned entirely until we decide on "ground rules" and slowly but surely open it up. Any usage of ANYTHING considered "AI" should go before a court - an "AI supreme court" if you will, and a license issued for exclusively that usage (and it would be monitored and its inputs/outputs tested, all software code/algorithms would be available to the court for review which would consist of highly renowned developers and those who understand how the tech works). But that's clearly not how America works - even if there's real human harm and suffering, the rules/laws only come later, after the bloodshed, far too late. It'll sadly be the same here.
- dontreact 5y ago
  FDA is heavily regulating medical AI products and there is an extensive legal framework around them. See 501k
- xbar 5y ago
  I think your model for how laws get written is wrong. Among civilians, AI is more like we are in the 1930s with airplane clubs--advancing technology out of the love of the idea. Ethical questions are important, but the harms do not seem significant enough to regulate before experimenting. Among the military, it's more like we are in the 1950s with the US/USSR nuclear arms race. The (real or perceived) need to drive AI technology without regard to ethics whatsoever comes from an analysis of the opponent which says they are not regarding ethics. There are no laws for civilians regarding AI. There are no treaties for countries regarding AI. And there won't be until after someone gets hurt. This is the normal model for laws.
version_five 5y ago
Is it common in the US to have this kind of "national initiative"? In Canada, we have various "National {x} strategies" but my perception is that they rarely accomplish anything and are more as favors to Canada's elites and for political gain. I had always associated this kind of thing more with our kind of political system. How is it percieved in the US?
- ed25519FUUU 5y ago
  In the USA, many technologies come out of government research labs, but almost exclusively from the defense space. As far as I know this type of thing hasn’t really produced anything of note, but sometimes it does affect policy.
  - Communitivity 5y ago
    It all depends on the amount of funding and top-level support. Many technologies get created within DoD and rest of US government, with most not achieving widespread adoption (I'm using that as criteria for being of note). Some do, such as the Library of Congress classification system that replaced the Dewey decimal system in many libraries (https://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/lcco/ https://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/lcco/) . Also, the internet, which grew out of Arpanet project (https://www.internetsociety.org/internet/history-internet/brief-history-internet/ https://www.internetsociety.org/internet/history-internet/br...)
- mistrial9 5y ago
  curious you should mention it (from Canada) ! "Since Canada published the world’s first national AI strategy in 2017, more than 30 other countries and regions have published similar documents as of December 2020." "The launch of the Global Partnership on AI (GPAI) and Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) AI Policy Observatory and Network of Experts on AI in 2020 promoted intergovernmental efforts to work together to support the development of AI for all." source: AI Index Report 2021 from Stanford HAI Lab [0] https://oecd.ai/wonk/oecd-and-g7-artificial-intelligence-initiatives-side-by-side-for-responsible-ai https://oecd.ai/wonk/oecd-and-g7-artificial-intelligence-ini...
throwaway823882 5y ago
Can we work on getting real intelligence into Congress first?
- dikaio 5y ago
  If I could upvote this a Milllion times I would.
kingsuper20 5y ago
They can call it the Fifth Generation Computer Systems initiative.
akomtu 5y ago
In the today's atmosphere, invention of AI would let the top few people (not percent, but people) absorb the entire wealth of the nation and have a completely loyal and merciless personal army powered by AI to cement their high status. Right now the too two persons in the US own more than the bottom 40%, but this status is shaky and depends on judicial framework run by people with their own opinions. AI would allow to remove this uncertainty.
- jszymborski 5y ago
  I think this statement rings true if your replace "AI" with most if not all technologies.
  - bosswipe 5y ago
    The difference is that with other tech if you have enough capital you can try to compete. With AI capital is not enough, you need oceans of data which is only available to the few companies that were able to position themselves early enough at the data spigots. For example, no matter how much capital Microsoft throws at it they aren't able to get access to all the data generated by mobile.
    - aynyc 5y ago
      This! I work for a company with ridiculous amount of data that goes back years. I just don't see how any new startups (even well funded ones) is gonna compete. It's not like they can go and ask users to resubmit the data.
      - btowngar 5y ago
        It's entirely feasible that you don't need ridiculous amounts of data to generate an AI - that's just the approach being taken by the vast majority of research teams.
        joe_the_user 5y ago
Yajirobe 5y ago
“Continued American leadership in Artificial Intelligence is of paramount importance to maintaining the economic and national security of the United States.” – President Donald J. Trump
dr_dshiv 5y ago
Is anyone else kind of freaked out at how "AI" is treated? Like, AI includes everything from handwritten algorithms to data dashboards to neural networks — and yet the concept seemingly assumes that, if people are involved in the information process, the AI isn't complete. I somehow find an AI focus deceptive and somehow unhealthy. Am I alone in this reaction?
- thesausageking 5y ago
  I agree. You can usually replace "AI" with "software" and not lose anything. In this case, when you do that, I think it's a great idea that the US has a national software initiative to advance research in these areas, create more education and training, help industries use software, and better understand the risks of things like untrustworthy software.
  - bravura 5y ago
    You can usually replace "AI" with "software" and not lose anything. I would rather replace "AI" with "software written by software". For someone in technology, the better suggests the level of indirection involved, and the potential for harder-to-detect bugs and corner cases.
    - dr_dshiv 5y ago
      AI is only very rarely software written by software.
    - thesausageking 5y ago
      ime, "AI" rarely means "software written by software" and more often means "we use scikit-learn to do some small step in our system".
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
ineedasername 5y ago
They need a better name. This is a blue sky research initiative, and any AI is going to be based on some equivalent of a neural net. I propose they rename themselves to something like "BlueNet", or maybe "SkyNet".
dikaio 5y ago
I’m wondering if the “justified font” selection was chosen by a human or AI…

202 points by KoftaBob 5y ago

I love the concept. The White House has been lacking any form of intelligence for quite some time, so this is a step in the right direction.

iseanstevens 5y ago
++
xpe 5y ago
> The White House has been lacking any form of intelligence This is exaggerated. What do you mean?
- KoftaBob 5y ago
  It sounds like they’re making a joke about the intelligence of past presidents.
  - commandlinefan 5y ago
    No need to limit yourself to the past.
thepasswordis 5y ago
This initiative was started under a previous administration. https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/ai/ https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/ai/
zedshawmotherfu 5y ago
And it's still devoid of it. Nothing to see here, other than performing pedantic prose.

rexreed 5y ago

[*] Re-launches. The White House has had an AI.Gov site for a few years, operated by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. For a short while during the transition, the AI.Gov site redirected to a subsite managed by NIST, but now it is back to having a self-managed site. You can see the old AI.Gov site here: https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/ai/ https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/ai/ The HN entry: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19446726 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19446726

eplanit 5y ago
But now that it's associated with Biden, it's really, really wonderful!
- rwcarlsen 5y ago
  Despite the sarcasm, I think your comment makes a really good point. People have lenses and biases that really make it difficult to objectively evaluate the actions of politicians/administrations independent of their like for the individuals in charge and other unrelated actions said politicians may have done.
  - sharker8 5y ago
    Politicians deserve to be evaluated for their body of work and history which includes statements and actions which may cause one to either like or dislike them.
    - rwcarlsen 5y ago
      I wasn't commenting on evaluating politicians. I was commenting on evaluating things they are involved with and do.
      - sharker8 5y ago
        They get involved in certain things by being who they are. And they avoid other things and other people by being themselves.

troelsSteegin 5y ago

It's from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) [0]. The audience for OSTP is cross-Federal, and the contributing agency scope for this site is wide. The Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) [1] used to do this kind of technology policy work too. OTA served US Congress, is no more, and may or may not be worthing bringing back [2]. Personally, I like seeing deep (no pun intended) technology expertise at work in US government. The Michael Lewis book "The Fifth Risk" was hagiographic that way. [0] https://www.whitehouse.gov/ostp/ https://www.whitehouse.gov/ostp/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Technology_Assessment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Technology_Assessmen... [2] https://www.brookings.edu/research/it-is-time-to-restore-the-us-office-of-technology-assessment/ https://www.brookings.edu/research/it-is-time-to-restore-the...

klmadfejno 5y ago

When I opened the page I was disappointed to not see a picture of someone using confusing holographic ui's to navigate some sort of graph. Scrolling down, I see my fears were unnecessary. AI == holographic UI. The girl in Education and Training appears to have no less than 16 unique holographic objects surrounding her. On the hand, the applications girl has a far simpler visual interface, but appears to require advanced spiderman hand gesture to properly interact with it.

sergiomattei 5y ago
What's so wrong about it? It's ugly, but it's just a graphic. It's not like it's going to forever taint their research.
- nerbert 5y ago
  It’s a metaphor. Beautiful metaphor.
- klmadfejno 5y ago
  I think it's charming personally.
- ineedasername 5y ago
  It's not that it's ugly-- it looks fine. It's just that it conveys no information about what it's supposed to represent.
relativeadv 5y ago
ok
dash2 5y ago
Unfortunately AI has not yet advanced enough to remove the blocky gif artifacts when you zoom in on ET girl.
coding123 5y ago
Well, I was about to say - the applications girl is going to click on, what exactly, parts of the brain? Then there are these images like "$" or "mobile phone" or "chat"... If I was presented that interface, I mean what am I expected to get if I click on the Amygdala - like some kind of bitcoin pay out?

ape4 5y ago

Big "Back to Top" button is big

josefresco 5y ago
And it's on the left. I kind of like it.
xpe 5y ago
Commentary about minutiae of the layout is uninteresting in my POV and per HN guidelines. Please help keep HN interesting.

mark_l_watson 5y ago

A good thing, I suppose. I read through the first linked paper and there was so much boilerplate. Someone needs to train a transformer model to remove boilerplate for casual reading. I have to love the domain AI.gov, I wish I owned something similar. I do have M-x-AI.com, but that is really only meaningful to Emacs users, right over the head of vim users.

rsfern 5y ago
Do you mean this OSTP report on cloud computing? Personally I think it’s pretty straight to the point for a government report like this. There’s like half a page introduction and it’s straight to specific recommendations and goals. They even put the core idea for each point in bold... [pdf]: https://www.nitrd.gov/pubs/Recommendations-Cloud-AI-RD-Nov2020.pdf https://www.nitrd.gov/pubs/Recommendations-Cloud-AI-RD-Nov20...
- mark_l_watson 5y ago
  That was the paper. I agree with you that for government reports, it is not too verbose, I was just wishing that someone else would do the work of training a model to summarize government reports.
  - panzagl 5y ago
    A lot of US government boilerplate is to document authority, responsibility and jurisdiction- basically it's "Why we're qualified to spend the taxpayer's money doing this, who told us to do it, and why it's necessary".

aboringusername 5y ago

I am hoping in the near term future we can have serious conversations about the usage of AI and where it stands legally, because from what I see in 2021 is an essential freeforall (clearview AI being one example). Can anyone link to me a comprehensive set of rules/laws governing AI, at all, in any country on earth? I assume it's now legal to collect whatever data you like, as much of it as you wish, and even if it leaks online (as the recent FB data breach did), you're "a-okay". Cool, so now I know PII is a fair game to collect, sell, profile, and use as I please, any actual real-world human impact from this (deaths, scams, anything in between) is not my problem. I know for a fact I won't be prosecuted, fined or challenged in any way (provided I'm Mark Zuckerberg and appease my overlords), anyone insignificant will get the book thrown at them as is typical. We seem to have a real issue with getting to grips with this new technology and how it can easily be used in both good ways to enhance industries but also work against humans (racial bias/profiling for example). I honestly am amazed "AI" is even legal today, it should be explicitly banned entirely until we decide on "ground rules" and slowly but surely open it up. Any usage of ANYTHING considered "AI" should go before a court - an "AI supreme court" if you will, and a license issued for exclusively that usage (and it would be monitored and its inputs/outputs tested, all software code/algorithms would be available to the court for review which would consist of highly renowned developers and those who understand how the tech works). But that's clearly not how America works - even if there's real human harm and suffering, the rules/laws only come later, after the bloodshed, far too late. It'll sadly be the same here.

dontreact 5y ago
FDA is heavily regulating medical AI products and there is an extensive legal framework around them. See 501k
xbar 5y ago
I think your model for how laws get written is wrong. Among civilians, AI is more like we are in the 1930s with airplane clubs--advancing technology out of the love of the idea. Ethical questions are important, but the harms do not seem significant enough to regulate before experimenting. Among the military, it's more like we are in the 1950s with the US/USSR nuclear arms race. The (real or perceived) need to drive AI technology without regard to ethics whatsoever comes from an analysis of the opponent which says they are not regarding ethics. There are no laws for civilians regarding AI. There are no treaties for countries regarding AI. And there won't be until after someone gets hurt. This is the normal model for laws.

version_five 5y ago

Is it common in the US to have this kind of "national initiative"? In Canada, we have various "National {x} strategies" but my perception is that they rarely accomplish anything and are more as favors to Canada's elites and for political gain. I had always associated this kind of thing more with our kind of political system. How is it percieved in the US?

ed25519FUUU 5y ago
In the USA, many technologies come out of government research labs, but almost exclusively from the defense space. As far as I know this type of thing hasn’t really produced anything of note, but sometimes it does affect policy.
- Communitivity 5y ago
  It all depends on the amount of funding and top-level support. Many technologies get created within DoD and rest of US government, with most not achieving widespread adoption (I'm using that as criteria for being of note). Some do, such as the Library of Congress classification system that replaced the Dewey decimal system in many libraries (https://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/lcco/ https://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/lcco/) . Also, the internet, which grew out of Arpanet project (https://www.internetsociety.org/internet/history-internet/brief-history-internet/ https://www.internetsociety.org/internet/history-internet/br...)
mistrial9 5y ago
curious you should mention it (from Canada) ! "Since Canada published the world’s first national AI strategy in 2017, more than 30 other countries and regions have published similar documents as of December 2020." "The launch of the Global Partnership on AI (GPAI) and Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) AI Policy Observatory and Network of Experts on AI in 2020 promoted intergovernmental efforts to work together to support the development of AI for all." source: AI Index Report 2021 from Stanford HAI Lab [0] https://oecd.ai/wonk/oecd-and-g7-artificial-intelligence-initiatives-side-by-side-for-responsible-ai https://oecd.ai/wonk/oecd-and-g7-artificial-intelligence-ini...

throwaway823882 5y ago

Can we work on getting real intelligence into Congress first?

dikaio 5y ago
If I could upvote this a Milllion times I would.

kingsuper20 5y ago

They can call it the Fifth Generation Computer Systems initiative.

akomtu 5y ago

In the today's atmosphere, invention of AI would let the top few people (not percent, but people) absorb the entire wealth of the nation and have a completely loyal and merciless personal army powered by AI to cement their high status. Right now the too two persons in the US own more than the bottom 40%, but this status is shaky and depends on judicial framework run by people with their own opinions. AI would allow to remove this uncertainty.

jszymborski 5y ago
I think this statement rings true if your replace "AI" with most if not all technologies.
- bosswipe 5y ago
  The difference is that with other tech if you have enough capital you can try to compete. With AI capital is not enough, you need oceans of data which is only available to the few companies that were able to position themselves early enough at the data spigots. For example, no matter how much capital Microsoft throws at it they aren't able to get access to all the data generated by mobile.
  - aynyc 5y ago
    This! I work for a company with ridiculous amount of data that goes back years. I just don't see how any new startups (even well funded ones) is gonna compete. It's not like they can go and ask users to resubmit the data.
    - btowngar 5y ago
      It's entirely feasible that you don't need ridiculous amounts of data to generate an AI - that's just the approach being taken by the vast majority of research teams.
      - joe_the_user 5y ago

Yajirobe 5y ago

“Continued American leadership in Artificial Intelligence is of paramount importance to maintaining the economic and national security of the United States.” – President Donald J. Trump

dr_dshiv 5y ago

Is anyone else kind of freaked out at how "AI" is treated? Like, AI includes everything from handwritten algorithms to data dashboards to neural networks — and yet the concept seemingly assumes that, if people are involved in the information process, the AI isn't complete. I somehow find an AI focus deceptive and somehow unhealthy. Am I alone in this reaction?

thesausageking 5y ago
I agree. You can usually replace "AI" with "software" and not lose anything. In this case, when you do that, I think it's a great idea that the US has a national software initiative to advance research in these areas, create more education and training, help industries use software, and better understand the risks of things like untrustworthy software.
- bravura 5y ago
  You can usually replace "AI" with "software" and not lose anything. I would rather replace "AI" with "software written by software". For someone in technology, the better suggests the level of indirection involved, and the potential for harder-to-detect bugs and corner cases.
  - dr_dshiv 5y ago
    AI is only very rarely software written by software.
  - thesausageking 5y ago
    ime, "AI" rarely means "software written by software" and more often means "we use scikit-learn to do some small step in our system".
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

ineedasername 5y ago

They need a better name. This is a blue sky research initiative, and any AI is going to be based on some equivalent of a neural net. I propose they rename themselves to something like "BlueNet", or maybe "SkyNet".

dikaio 5y ago

I’m wondering if the “justified font” selection was chosen by a human or AI…