Prabhakar was a key player in passing the president’s executive order on AI in 2023, which sets rules for tech corporations to make AI safer and more transparent (though it relies on voluntary participation). Before serving in President Biden’s cabinet, she held a lot of government roles, from rallying for domestic production of semiconductors to heading up DARPA, the Pentagon’s famed research department.
I had a probability to take a seat down with Prabhakar earlier this month. We discussed AI risks, immigration policies, the CHIPS Act, the general public’s faith in science, and the way all of it may change under Trump.
The change of administrations comes at a chaotic time for AI. Trump’s team has not presented a transparent thesis on how it can handle artificial intelligence, but plenty of individuals in it wish to see that executive order dismantled. Trump said as much in July, endorsing the Republican platform that claims the chief order “hinders AI innovation and imposes Radical Leftwing ideas on the event of this technology.” Powerful industry players, like enterprise capitalist Marc Andreessen, have said they support that move. Nevertheless, complicating that narrative might be Elon Musk, who for years has expressed fears about doomsday AI scenarios and has been supportive of some regulations aiming to advertise AI safety. Nobody really knows exactly what’s coming next, but Prabhakar has loads of thoughts about what’s happened thus far.
For her insights about crucial AI developments of the last administration, and what might occur in the subsequent one, read my conversation with Arati Prabhakar.
Deeper Learning
These AI Minecraft characters did weirdly human stuff all on their very own
The video game Minecraft is increasingly popular as a testing ground for AI models and agents. That’s a trend startup Altera recently embraced. It unleashed as much as 1,000 software agents at a time, powered by large language models (LLMs), to interact with each other. Given only a nudge through text prompting, they developed a remarkable range of personality traits, preferences, and specialist roles, with no further inputs from their human creators. Remarkably, they spontaneously made friends, invented jobs, and even spread religion.
Why this matters: AI agents can execute tasks and exhibit autonomy, taking initiative in digital environments. That is one other example of how the behaviors of such agents, with minimal prompting from humans, might be each impressive and downright bizarre. The people working to bring agents into the world have daring ambitions for them. Altera’s founder, Robert Yang sees the Minecraft experiments as an early step towards large-scale “AI civilizations” with agents that may coexist and work alongside us in digital spaces. “The true power of AI might be unlocked when we now have truly autonomous agents that may collaborate at scale,” says Yang. Read more from Niall Firth.
Bits and Bytes
OpenAI is exploring promoting
