Earlier this summer season, Grok shocked the world after Musk introduced he could be updating the bot to get rid of a supposed liberal bias. The unhinged chatbot started spouting offensive outputs, together with antisemitic posts that praised Hitler in addition to proclaiming itself “MechaHitler.”
However these apparent biases didn’t battle with the Pentagon’s determination to grant xAI a $200 million federal contract. In a press release, a Pentagon spokesperson insisted that “the antisemitism episode wasn’t sufficient to disqualify” xAI, NBC Information reported, partly since “a number of frontier AI fashions have produced questionable outputs.”
The Pentagon’s assertion instructed that the federal government anticipated to cope with such dangers whereas seizing the chance of quickly deploying rising AI expertise into authorities prototype processes. And maybe notably, Trump offers a carveout for any businesses utilizing AI fashions to safeguard nationwide safety, which may exclude the Pentagon from experiencing any “anti-woke” delays in accessing frontier fashions.
However that will not assist different businesses who should determine the best way to assess fashions to satisfy anti-woke AI necessities over the subsequent few months. And people assessments may trigger delays that Trump could want to keep away from in pushing for widespread AI adoption throughout authorities.
Trump’s anti-woke AI agenda could also be unimaginable
On the identical day that Trump issued his anti-woke AI order, his AI Motion Plan promised an AI “renaissance” fueling “mental achievements” by “unraveling historic scrolls as soon as thought unreadable, making breakthroughs in scientific and mathematical idea, and creating new sorts of digital and bodily artwork.”
To realize that, the US should “innovate quicker and extra comprehensively than our rivals” and get rid of regulatory obstacles impeding innovation in an effort to “set the gold normal for AI worldwide.”
Nonetheless, attaining the anti-woke ambitions of each orders raises a technical drawback that even the president should settle for at the moment has no resolution. In his AI Motion Plan, Trump acknowledged that “the inside workings of frontier AI techniques are poorly understood,” with even “superior technologists” unable to clarify “why a mannequin produced a selected output.”
Whether or not requiring AI firms to clarify their AI outputs to win authorities contracts will mess with different elements of Trump’s motion plan stays to be seen. However Samir Jain, vice chairman of coverage at a civil liberties group known as the Middle for Democracy and Know-how, advised the NYT that he predicts the anti-woke AI agenda will set “a extremely imprecise normal that’s going to be unimaginable for suppliers to satisfy.”
