The White House now has a special webpage for its AI efforts
The White House has launched a new online home for the federal government’s efforts around artificial intelligence — AI.gov.
Michael Kratsios, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy’s deputy CTO, announced the creation of the domain, which forwards to a page on whitehouse.gov, during his remarks at The Economist’s AI Agenda summit Tuesday.
The page is a “real hub for all the AI projects being done across the agencies,” Kratsios said. “You really do see the depth and the breadth of all the work being done.”
The page leads with the executive order on AI that President Trump signed in February to create the American AI Initiative. It also includes sections on the Select Committee on AI that Trump created in May 2018, links to (some) agency-level AI programs, AI-focused workforce training programs sponsored by federal grants and a section dedicated to “AI with American Values.”
“The United States has long been a champion and defender of the core values of freedom, guarantees of human rights, the rule of law, stability in our institutions, rights to privacy, respect for intellectual property, and opportunities to all to pursue their dreams,” the section states. “Our goal is to ensure that AI technologies are understandable, trustworthy, robust, and safe.”
Essentially the webpage is Trump’s AI executive order, translated for general-interest visitors and laid out in user-friendly sections.
The Trump administration seems to be changing its tune on the value that this kind of central repository of information and narrative provides. When the Center for Data Innovation advocated for the creation of an AI national strategy document in December, OSTP Assistant Director for AI Lynne Parker argued that the absence of a document does not constitute the absence of a strategy.
“I would argue that you don’t need everything written down in a PDF to see what a strategy is,” she said at the time.
On Monday, the Trump administration released 2020 budget request documents that show a requested $850 million for AI research and development funding, in what Kratsios called a “tight budget environment” (read: most agency R&D budgets took a cut in the 2020 proposal as compared to 2019).
