Silicon Valley’s gamble to back Donald Trump just paid off. Big time.
The president’s 28-page AI strategy, “Winning the AI Race: America’s AI Action Plan”, is a streamlined, focused, and recommendation-heavy policy document, backed by three new executive orders.
It reads as if it was written by Silicon Valley to turn its demands for AI into national policy – because it was.
The man behind the plan, David Sacks, the White House AI and cryptocurrency tsar, is a founding partner of PayPal and a high-profile tech investor.
US President Donald Trump and White House AI and crypto tsar David Sacks in July. Pic: AP/Alex Brandon
With its call for deregulation, infrastructure investment and more relaxed AI export rules, the plan is designed to turbocharge big tech’s bet on increasingly powerful generative AI.
For a president dedicated to putting America first, it’s a sensible plan. The dominance of US big tech, from social media to the fastest and best computer chips, is undeniable. Given the potential size of the AI prize, removing red tape to boost the development of AI is surely a good thing.
Slashing environmental and planning requirements for AI datacentres and energy infrastructure to power them, then removing red tape around the development and use of AI in finance, healthcare, the workplace and scientific research will surely see America reap those rewards first and cement its role as the AI superpower.
The ostensible threat to its dominance is China.
By stimulating the development of the best AI models in the US, and removing blocks on the export of US-developed AI technology like certain high-performance computer processors imposed by the last administration, the plan hopes to embed US-built AI into the global economy ahead of Chinese technology.
President Donald Trump speaks during an AI summit in Washington. Pic: AP/Julia Demaree Nikhinson
While Silicon Valley may have staged a coup in terms of federal policy, the plan doesn’t necessarily fix its bet on AI.
The likes of Meta, Microsoft, Open AI, Google, Apple and X are investing hundreds of billions of dollars in AI and its associated energy-hungry infrastructure. But, so far at least, have realised profits that are an order of magnitude less.
Most companies and individuals are still trying to figure out how to use generative AI. The money behind that massive AI investment is starting to get nervous.
Action plan doesn’t guarantee success
Critics of big tech go as far as to say the urgency of the “race” that the action plan is designed to win was dreamt up by Silicon Valley lobbyists to persuade an America-first White House to do their bidding before the AI bubble bursts.
Trump’s AI action plan should help calm their nerves, but it doesn’t necessarily guarantee success.
Despite promising to slash red tape and prioritise AI datacentres stuck in years-long queues to access America’s ageing electricity grid, the AI action plan says nothing of who is going to finance it.
Stock image of a datacentre. Pic: iStock
American consumers may react badly if their utility bills soar to pay for the quintupling of energy infrastructure America’s AI industry is forecast to require, especially if the AI isn’t benefiting them.
As written, the AI action plan doesn’t seem particularly concerned about that at all. It mentions re-training for workers displaced by AI, but no mechanism to pay for it.
More importantly, it vows to remove regulations that limit the adoption of AI, to the point of threatening to remove federal funding from states that do.
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Some of those laws might be holding back the adoption of technology that could benefit consumers or make local government more efficient.
Many of them, however, protect consumers by ensuring their data isn’t exploited, tech firms don’t steal their intellectual property to improve their AI, their access to healthcare or insurance isn’t unfairly controlled by an algorithm, or their local environment isn’t destroyed by data centres’ insatiable demand for energy and water for cooling.
Ordinary Americans may end up serving AI, not the other way round.
