Trump reveals new AI czar and gives him 120 days to report on pros, cons of technology
WASHINGTON — President Trump has tapped Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton as his new artificial-intelligence czar — and given him 120 days to report on the pros and cons of the technology.Clayton will oversee a so-called Super Intelligence Force, which is being formed as Trump resists pressure to throttle AI development.“The president asked that a group be put together that was going to ensure exactly what he said … [that] we stay the leaders in superintelligence and that the interests of the American people are put first,” Clayton told the Wall Street Journal about his new role.Trump has called for rebranding AI as superintelligence, or SI.“The risk of not being first is high,” Clayton told the outlet.“Not being first increases the identified and unidentified risks, particularly from our adversaries.
Being first will better enable us to address those risks on behalf of the American people.”A blizzard of polls has identified public skepticism over AI.Last month, those fears reached a fever pitch when a researcher at Anthropic quit his job, dramatically warning that the technology could lead to human extinction and that industry leaders were aware of and worried about the likelihood.Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman have both called for a slowdown in the development of AI.Altman highlighted the Hugging Face online-platform incident in which engineers at his firm had been training a model with some safety parameters turned off on ExploitGym, which tests hacking capabilities.
The system allegedly went rogue and hacked a company on its own.The deeply disturbing incidents led to a chorus of calls on Capitol Hill, particularly among Democrats, for greater regulation of AI, but Trump rejected that, warning such a move would be a godsend for China.Trump held a gathering of CEOs of top AI companies last week, during which they signed a “White House Accord on Super Intelligence” agreeing to general principles about the de...