Three months since President Joe Biden signed an executive order on artificial intelligence, many federal agencies have now made substantial progress in regulating AI. But have these advancements actually made noticeable change?
Ben Buchanan, White House Special Advisor for AI, joins Yahoo Finance Tech Editor Dan Howley on the Live show to discuss the AI laws signed by President Biden and the impact they've had in the tech world.
"The president secured voluntary commitments from the leading 15 AI companies in the United States last year to embed watermarks in their products as they roll them out going forward," Buchanan mentions. "Companies are starting to do that. On the government side, we're in the process of developing watermarking standards through the new AI Safety Institute and the Department of Commerce to make sure we have a clear set of rules of the road and guidance here..."
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- The Biden administration laying out key AI actions on Monday three months after the President signed an executive order in an effort to manage the risks of artificial intelligence. Now federal agencies reporting that they have completed all of the 90-day actions tasked by the order and also advanced other directives that have a longer time frame.
So where do we go from here and how effective has this executive order been, we want to bring in Ben Buchanan. He's the White House Special Advisor for AI. He joins us now along with our very own tech reporter, Dan Howley. Great to have both of you. Ben, let's talk about the progress that has been made so far. What does that progress look like on innovation? What does that progress look like on regulation?
BEN BUCHANAN: Well, the executive order lays out a number of activities across the board, innovation, regulation, civil rights. And on the 90-day time frame, we've accomplished all of those actions. So for example on the regulation side, one of the things we've done is now mandate that companies have to share their safety test results with the government before they release AI products to the public.
On the innovation side, we kicked off the pilot for the National AI Research Resource. This is a pilot program that brings a lot more computing power and data to small businesses and academics all across the United States to have as dynamic an AI ecosystem and innovation ecosystem as possible.
DAN HOWLEY: Hi, this is Dan. I want to ask more about the regulations. Obviously, we're seeing more conversation pop up there. You know, the safety of the systems, how they're being used, this comes up, as we saw, the issues with Taylor Swift and X, the issues with Joe Biden, the voice call that went out that was a deep fake voice call. I guess where is the administration on trying to regulate this kind of use of AI?
BEN BUCHANAN: So a lot of what you're talking about there is watermarking and content provenance, the deepfake category, and we made some progress here as well. But those actions aren't a little bit of a longer time frame because a lot of the technology to manage those risks is still being developed.
One of the things we did do was the president secured voluntary commitments from the leading 15 AI companies in the United States last year to embed watermarks in their product-- in their products as they roll them out going forward. And companies are starting to do that.
And in the government side, we're in the process of developing watermarking standards through the new AI Safety Institute and the Department of Commerce to make sure that we have a clear set of rules of the road and guidance here for how do we address some of these thorny watermarking and content provenance problems.
- And some of the areas that the White House under President Biden has prioritized spending in order for future innovation, whether that be in chips, whether that be in even certain types of infrastructure as well, where does spending for generative AI kind of stand in terms of the docket or the order of prioritization as we move forward? And what type of money, what type of overall capital do you think is going to be necessary to put towards this effort?
BEN BUCHANAN: Certainly all the money that was appropriated for the CHIPS and Science Act, which is vitally important for American innovation, will help with AI given the role of semiconductors in enabling frontier AI progress. And we want to make sure that those chips are being produced in the United States and we have that innovative ecosystem here. So that, I think, is a big thing we've done already.
Going forward, I think it's fair to say that when the president's budget comes out in March, we'll continue to see prioritization of AI, of the effective government use of AI in that budget request. The executive order is not a budget so we can't do appropriations in executive order.
But what we do do in the executive order is direct government programs like the Technology Modernization Fund to prioritize the use of generative AI in their programmatic allocations so that we have a kind of immediate action that we're taking here, which was accomplished already to do that prioritization on government spending to improve the use of AI within the government.
DAN HOWLEY: And part of this executive order originally called for an AI kind of hiring blitz. How has that been going? And where are we seeing this kind of build up in AI hiring?
BEN BUCHANAN: We have been overwhelmed by the talent that wants to come work for the government. So we relaunched with the executive order ai.gov. And we accomplished the bureaucratic feat of getting every single AI job in the US government tagged and put ai.gov so it's one-stop shopping. Those jobs are still up there.
We also had surge hiring programs through the US Digital Service, the Presidential Innovation Fellowship, and the US Digital Core. And we had a lot of applications, you know, many multiples that we had in previous years. So those folks are being onboarded now. I think there's a lot more to do. It's going to require more appropriations from Congress. But for the jobs we had available, we've seen extraordinary interest and we're bringing those people on.
DAN HOWLEY: When it comes to overall regulations, I know we spoke about what the executive order is capable of doing. But how far away are we from Congress actually taking action on this and what is the administration doing to goose those efforts?
BEN BUCHANAN: We've had good conversations with Congress. The day after he signed the executive order, the president, hosted the four bipartisan senators who have worked in great depth on AI throughout all of 2023 in the Oval Office. He had a very productive conversation with them about legislation and the like.
I think it's fair to say Congress, as you all know very well, has a lot going on right now so I wouldn't want to be in the business of making a prediction as to when we'll see Congressional action on AI. But I think it's fair to say we've had very productive conversations on both sides of the aisle.
- Ben Buchanan, White House Special Advisor for Artificial Intelligence, as well as, Dan Howley here with us. Thanks so much for joining us for this conversation.
