The Office of Science and Technology Policy is seeking public input to revise a national artificial intelligence research and development plan after an update from the Biden administration.
In a request for information Released for public inspection Monday, the White House Science and Technology Store specifically requested comments on how a 2023 update to the National Artificial Intelligence Research and Development Strategic Plan could be “rewritten” to maintain the nation’s competitiveness in the technology.
A proposed update follows steps taken by the current Trump administration to undo And revise the previous administration’s approach to AI. As part of these efforts, Trump also sought public input on an AI action plan to set policy priorities. According to the RFI, responses from this comment period, which resulted in more than 10,000 responseswill also be taken into account in the development of the new R&D plan.
The request for proposals will be officially published Tuesday in the Federal Register and the comment period will last until May 29.
This first national AI R&D plan was drafted in 2016 by the first Trump administration and has been updated twice since – once by Donald Trump and once by Joe Biden. With each update, the strategic areas of this first document have generally been maintained and expanded.
Trump’s First of all The strategic plan outlined seven strategic areas for R&D, such as making long-term investments, developing methods for human collaboration, and ensuring AI systems were safe and effective. The Trump administration then revised In 2019, this project plans to add a strategy on the expansion of public-private partnerships in AI.
Following this update, Congress began mandating regular reviews of the plan as part of the National AI Initiative Act of 2020, and in 2023 the Biden administration released its report. updated version. This plan concluded that the previous eight strategies “were broadly considered to have merit going forward” and added a new strategy aimed at establishing a “principled and coordinated approach to international collaboration in AI research.”
In its first public remarks As OSTP director earlier this month, Michael Kratsios focused on AI R&D, saying the country “needs to be more creative in our use of public research and development funds and shape a funding environment that makes clear what our national priorities are.”
Kratsios said it was the government’s “duty to enable scientists to create new theories and empower engineers to put them into practice” and suggested levers such as “awards, advance market commitments and other innovative funding mechanisms, such as rapid and flexible grants” to boost this research.
However, this announcement also follows the announcement that the National Science Foundation, which is the federal government’s primary scientific research agency, to end research grants that do not correspond to its priorities.
An open source tracker of cessations lists hundreds of canceled grants, including grants for AI research. This dataset – managed by Noam Ross, executive director of rOpenSci, an open science and data nonprofit, and Scott Delaney, a research scientist at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health – is collected through submissions and supplemented with publicly available data.