INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Sujai Hajela
Contributor
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Sujai Hajela is co-founder, president and CEO of
Mist, which develops self-learning wireless networks using artificial intelligence.
There been a bit of hysteria — AI-steria, if you
will — over the Trump administration recently issued American AI Initiative, formally known as &Executive Order on Maintaining American
Leadership in Artificial Intelligence.&
The initiative is a broad strategy &to sustain and enhance the scientific, technological, and
economic leadership position of the United States in AI RD and deployment.&
But critics have complained it short on specific actions and
lacks new funding to accomplish its goals, in contrast to China 2017 &Next Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan,& which
allocated billions to establish China as the &premier global AI innovation center& by 2030.
As Babson College professor Thomas Davenport
noted in a recent essay inThe Conversation:
One Chinese state alonehas said it will devote $5 billion to developing AI technologies and
The city ofBeijinghas committed $2 billion to developing an AI-focused industrial park
A major port, Tianjin, plans toinvest $16 billionin its local AI industry.
&China is ready to leapfrog the USA in AI
The US initiative has NO money,& tweeted one skeptic, Moor Insights Strategy analyst Karl Freund.
China is going to leapfrog the USA in
The @realDonaldTrump initiative has NO money
While US Startups are all finishing their chips, Huawei, Baidu, Cambricon, and Horizon Robotics are all shipping theirs
I guess the USA prefers to invest in walls.https://t.co/khJe26ndnj
— Karl Freund (@karlfreund) February 15, 2019
While I wholeheartedly
agree that the United States must not cede AI leadership to China or any other country, I find some of the critiques of the initiative
In fact, even if its value is largely symbolic — more of a vision statement than a detailed blueprint — I still believe the initiative
can help move forward the national AI agenda.
Let unpack a few things.
While many talk about AI in the context of a rivalry between two
superpowers — and it well may be that, in some ways — AI is unlike similar global competitions of the past
Take the 20th century Space Race between the United States and the Soviet Union, for example
The effort never would have gotten off the ground, literally, without huge financial commitments from the U.S
government.
Money for AI advancement, however, is pouring in from the private sector
According to a report by CB Insights and PwC, venture capital funding of AI companies skyrocketed 72 percent last year, to $9.3 billion
The surge followed three years of steadily increasing investment, with a 28 percent average annual increase between 2015 and 2017.
And it
not as though the government isn&t doing its part
IDC estimatedthe federal investment in cognitive and AI technologiesis growing at a CAGR of 54.3 percent between 2018 and 2021
Furthermore, while stopping short of specific dollar amounts, the initiative wasn&t exactly silent on the requirement for more government
funding, calling on all relevant agencies to consider AI a top RD priority and take that into account when developing budget proposals for
fiscal 2020 and beyond.
Meanwhile, colleges and universities working on exciting research in AI and its enabling technology, machine
learning and more are offering AI-specific training to help solve a skills shortage in the field.
College students reportedly enrolled in
introductory AI and machine learning classes in record numbers last year, the number of academic papers on the topic soaredand, according
toa Stanford University analysis of transcripts, officials mentioned the technology in more than 70 congressional hearings
I&m not surprised that Carnegie Mellon (no AI slouch, having introduced an undergraduate AI program last year) reacted very positively to
the American AI Initiative
&The American AI Initiative focus on prioritizing research and development, responsibly leveraging data as a national resource and investing
in an AI-ready workforce will bring new energy to our national innovation ecosystem,& the university said in a statement.
All of this points
to the reality that the private sector, as has been the case so many times throughout the annals of U.S
innovation, is taking the lead in AI and counting on entrepreneurial spirit rather than government largesse to win the day.
As a Bloomberg
editorial put it: &This contrasts favorably with (say) China, where the government is pumping billions of dollars directly into AI-related
This may advance the field somewhat, but it also a good way to sustain hopeless businesses, crowd out private investment, encourage
cronyism, inflate bubbles, and generally make a hash of things.&
Simply by virtue of shining a bright spotlight on AI as a national
priority, the initiative can have significant practical effects
For example, let say a VC firm is deciding whether to fund an AI startup or one in another hot space, such as the Internet of Things
The tone set by the initiative could tilt the decision in the AI firm favor
It also could spur more universities to investigate interesting AI technologies in their labs, and further invigorate efforts to train the
next generation of AI practitioners.
The American AI Initiative isn&t as cut and dried as the critics suggest
If it nothing more than a stake in the ground about AI essential role in the nation future, it still an important stake.
