Trump cuts scientific research, threatening his administration’s own AI action plan | Trump administration

this Trump administration issued “American AI Action PlanLast month’s goal was to expand U.S. dominance AI To maintain global advantages, especially to surpass China.

But Donald Trump’s Cut funding for scientific research Through federal agencies – including National Intuition Health,,,,, National Science Foundation, this National Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and NASA – Experts in the field say that this goal will be undermined and threatened to promote the research environment that underlies artificial intelligence.

Mark Histed, head of neural computing and behavior at NIH, said that while the impact of cuts on AI may not be obvious, they threaten “the entire ecosystem we have built around AI, which was created by federal support.”

“What I see is an ecosystem, right? I see multiple different distributions contributing different aspects to this process. I see academic playing a key role and industry playing a key role. And so as we look forward and we think about trying to advance AI, we need to be supporting that entire ecosystem,” Rebecca Willett, a computer science professor at the University of Chicago and faculty director of AI at the Data Science Institute, explained, echoing Histed.

History and Willett both believe that without federally funded research, AI would simply not exist in its current form and provides a variety of AI technologies and companies that should be attributed to federal funding.

For example, self-driving cars rely on computer vision technology – federal funds support their development Since the 1980s. Computer vision is the basis of most facial and image recognition technologies. Alphafold uses AI to help discover new drugs and humans, which improves AI security, including the U.S. Department of Defense, and also benefits from federal support.

AI research often takes clues from other scientific fields, which in turn can help promote AI, so cutting other disciplines will affect the development of intelligence. History points to the overlap between his field of neuroscience and AI.

“We’re just starting to understand how networks of connected neurons create features like memory and cognition,” he said. “The same is true if you look at machine learning networks or AI networks.”

History points out that federally funded research that brings these disciplines together has led to Nobel Prize-winning work. Jeffrey Hinton and John Hopfield Win the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics Because they work in the intersection of neuroscience and AI and are supported by NSF.

Trump’s plan could also pose a threat to AI security, which is crucial to ensuring that AI is not only effective, but also operates within the legal scope. The plan includes amending the guidelines in the National Institute of Standards and Technology to “eliminate references on misinformation, diversity, equity and inclusion, and climate change”. These are the three most controversial aspects of AI Facial recognition Technology and popular applications Like chatgpt.

A recent study found It is recommended that women pay less than men When prompted for advice on salary expectations. Historically, the field of AI security is also closely related to neuroscience, because understanding how human neural networks produce bias can also help us understand how AI networks produce bias.

Trump’s plan also requires a small number of traditional Chinese tape festivals to build AI data centers that can absorb a lot of energy. Large-scale machine learning systems “are at a huge cost source. It’s a lot of energy, a lot of cooling,” Willett said.

But, she added, regardless of Trump’s plan, AI companies themselves should still reduce those costs.

“Not only do they have environmental impact, but it’s expensive for companies running these systems. So, I think in the AI community, people are investing in trying to make these systems more efficient,” Willett said.

Willett and History say that if the federal government no longer trains in colleges, the AI community will be threatened in the coming years. The historical record points out that the federally funded “talent pipeline” is very important”, adding: “We trained a lot of people directly to these tech companies in neuroscience and related fields and people in many related fields. There is a lot of overlap. All those leading the AI revolution have been trained with the academia that trains them and federal training and has received training and federal support.

“One of the main ways that tech companies benefit from college is that we train students, right?” Willett said. “So they got into these companies with the most advanced skills these companies need. So, just in the case of bats, I think universities play an important role in the industry.”