In the latest episode of the Washington AI Network podcast, in partnership with GlobalWIN at the House at 1229, host Tammy Haddad interviewed Dr. Arati Prabhakar, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). an R&D call for action and Kamala Harris’ work on AI in her role as Vice President, Dr. Prabhakar explained the importance of funding for U.S. AI research and development, the need for transparency in AI used for public purposes, and why she’s disinterested in Sam Altman’s and others’ benchmarking of AI model capabilities to human intelligence.
“I just actually think it’s the wrong conversation,” said Prabhakar when asked about Sam Altman’s prediction of AI superintelligence in 1000 days. “There are a lot of people in AI who are just so fascinated with, ‘Can you make a machine that does things that humans can do?’ I’m actually not that interested. The first time I had a machine that could do something better than I could do, it was my calculator.I’m happy to see that. And I actually think a lot of this conversation about greater than human intelligence reveals a lack of understanding of what human intelligence actually is. We don’t actually understand it. And so I think it’s fine to have those conversations, but they do make me feel like I’m in a freshman dorm room at 2: 00 in the morning, so I like to stay in the real world.”
Prabhakar discussing the need for U.S. AI R&D spending: “Right now, I’m most concerned that we are not resourcing the government-funded R&D at a level that would allow us to keep up with the scale of our ambitions. We should always be the most ambitious country on the planet, and we are. We are, but we have to deliver on that, including with R&D.”
Prabhakar further explained: “American research and development spending, public sector and private sector together, is currently at 3.5% of GDP. That’s phenomenal. It’s a very healthy sign for the country… even though China’s spending in R&D has grown at just a breathtaking pace… It grew 27 fold in 25 years. Think about that. They are still not caught up with us though, we’re still number one. And the reason for that huge American position in R&D is purely because our industry has been expanding R&D much faster than the economy has been growing. They’ve been accelerating the percentage of GDP that they’re spending.”
When asked about Vice President Harris’ work on AI, Prabhakar was confident about Harris’ familiarity with the tech sector: “In the body of work that we’ve been doing on AI, [Harris] has just been very focused on it throughout this whole period… The vice president early on hosted a group of CEOs who came together…. That was a meeting that led to voluntary commitments because the vice president said to those CEOs, ‘You have not just a legal obligation, but a moral obligation to make sure your products are safe before they go out into the world.’ I think that was extremely powerful. A few weeks later, she convened a group of civil society organizations. We had labor leaders, we had consumer protection organizations, we had civil rights organizations. And of course she has such a deep background on technology and as AG in the state of California, of course she was very familiar with the issues.”
Prabhakar also shared a story about her time at DARPA more than a decade ago, when her team persuaded Moderna to apply their MRNA work to infectious diseases rather than cancer, ultimately allowing the U.S. to develop a COVID vaccine more quickly. “I tell that story, number one, because without federally funded research, we wouldn’t be where we are today,” said Prabhakar. “But number two, this is a perfect example of the government doing what it needs to do. We cared about infectious disease when that was not a market. And then companies doing what they need to do. They’re the ones that actually commercialized it, that did the manufacturing, that worked with NIH when NIH got on board down the road, and then the government came in and got shots into arms.”
Listen to the full episode on Audioboom, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.