WASHINGTON (AP) — Senior Biden administration officials discussed the future of artificial intelligence Thursday in a meeting with a group of executives from OpenAI, Nvidia, Microsoft and other companies. The focus was on building U.S. data centers and the infrastructure needed to develop the technology.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters at the daily press briefing that the meeting was aimed at increasing public-private collaboration, as well as the industry’s workforce and permitting needs. The industry’s computing power will likely depend on reliable access to electricity, which is why utilities Exelon and AES also attended the meeting to discuss the power grid’s needs.
The emergence of artificial intelligence is both promising and dangerous: the automatically generated text, images, audio, and video could help boost economic productivity, but it could also displace some workers. It could also serve as both a national security tool and a threat to protect against.
President Joe Biden signed a Executive decree to address technology developmentseeking to establish protections through measures such as watermarking AI content and to address consumer rights issues.
Present at the meeting for the administration were White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients, National Economic Council Director Lael Brainard, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, Deputy Chief of Staff Bruce Reed, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, among others.
Participants included Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Alphabet President and Chief Investment Officer Ruth Porat, Meta COO Javier Olivan, and Microsoft President and Corporate Vice President Brad Smith.
Matt Garman, CEO of Amazon subsidiary AWS, was also in attendance. The company said in a statement that attendees discussed modernizing the nation’s electric grid, expediting permitting for new projects and ensuring carbon-free energy projects are integrated into the grid.