President Donald Trump on Sunday downplayed the concerns overย artificial intelligence after critics called for slowing down their development and said the United States (US) would lose to China in the AI race by doing so. Describing the critics as ‘negative forces’, the 80-year-old Republican leader said they are raising the issues that will never happen.
Trump, a two-time US President, made the remarks while speaking to reporters at his golf club in Ireland’s Doonbeg.
“Well I say this, weโre leading China on AI. Weโre the most sophisticated country in the world and frankly I want to keep it that way, because whoever wins AI, wins,” The Hill quoted him as saying. “And we can put guardrails, and we can do this and that, but I think you have a lot of negative forces that are bringing it up and theyโre bringing up things that wonโt happen.”ย
Trump’s remarks came in response to a blog by Anthropic Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Dario Amodei, who has called slowing downing the “rapid development” of AI amid concerns that “superintelligent computer systems” would outperform the cognitive performance of humans.
Amodei’s ’12-month’ warning in blog postย
In his blog post titled ‘We Must Pace The Frontier’, Amodei cautioned that the AI could “outrun” the human ability if left unchecked. He said at current rate at which AI is progressing, it would take complete control of the internet in the next six to 12 months.
“We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models. Progress will still seem fast, and we must make wise use of the time we gain,” he said. “Not building the technology deprives humanity of benefits or simply places AI in the hands of authoritarian powers, while building it too fast is reckless. We have sought a middle way.”
OpenAI boss Sam Altman and Elon Musk came in support of Amodei.
Nonetheless, the US government has put in place a voluntary security review process for advanced AI models before their release, but the parameters of that program remain unclear. Industry observers, however, are not sure how effective it would be, as the Trump administration has thus far favored a light-touch, deregulatory approach to most industries, including tech.
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