WASHINGTON – Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer recently released the Senate’s long-promised bipartisan “roadmap” for the coming age of artificial intelligence – and the senator said he sees Western New York as a destination on that roadmap.
“I want the future of AI to be in Buffalo, not Beijing,” Schumer, a New York Democrat, said in an interview with The Buffalo News last week.
Schumer said Buffalo already has a head start on other communities because of the region’s designation as a federal “tech hub” and the University at Buffalo’s multipronged AI efforts, most notably as the home base for the state’s Empire AI research center.
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Then again, universities around the world are pouring money and effort into AI, and there’s no guarantee that Schumer’s roadmap – which calls for at least $32 billion in annual federal funding for AI research – can help Buffalo. After all, it’s just a roadmap, and one that met much criticism for its lack of detailed regulations for a technology that could both create and destroy jobs while blurring the line between truth and reality.
Schumer seeks to include UB, New York in federal AI research pilot
Schumer has invited the heads of the Biden Administration’s National AI Research Resource pilot to visit New York and “strongly consider” Empire AI for their two-year project to create a national shared infrastructure for AI innovation.
But Schumer is confident that his bipartisan AI effort will lead both to a brighter future for Western New York and for the country. He compares the fledgling AI effort to his yearslong effort to bring the microchip industry back to the U.S. The CHIPS and Science Act became law in 2022, creating the “tech hub” program and prompting Micron to commit to building a massive plant near Syracuse that will eventually employ 9,000 people.
“All of the research that we’ve done with CHIPS, making Buffalo a tech hub, will dovetail and make us well suited to deal with AI as well,” he said. “What we did with CHIPS was design a proposal that fits into upstate New York’s and Western New York’s needs. We’re trying to do the same with AI.”
The federal government designated Buffalo-Rochester-Syracuse as a tech hub last October, making the region eligible for upward of $75 million in federal funding. Schumer met last week with Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and said he came away confident that the region will get at least some of that money when funding is announced in the next few weeks.
Moreover, Schumer said the microchips that Micron will make in its new upstate plant will be necessary ingredients in the AI tools of the future, including those developed at UB.
The university’s efforts are extensive. Most notably, the state will invest $275 million over a decade in Empire AI, which will have a computing center at UB. But other AI announcements spin out of the university on a regular basis, with the most recent – a $1.8 million federal grant to UB researchers who will work on securing AI systems in the U.S. military – announced Friday.
If Congress approves $32 billion in annual funding for the roadmap’s National AI Research Resource, “we’re going to get a lot more money in Western New York for these computer systems and for training as well,” Schumer said.
Schumer said the additional research funding is the part of the AI roadmap most likely to be enacted by Congress this year, given that it has bipartisan support and that it could fit neatly into the federal funding bills for the fiscal year that starts Oct. 1.
The Senate’s Bipartisan AI Working Group developed the roadmap after a year’s worth of research and meetings with top tech leaders and others potentially affected by the growth of AI. Sen. Todd Young, an Indiana Republican who was part of the working group, praised the plan.
“This roadmap represents the most comprehensive and impactful bipartisan recommendations on artificial intelligence ever issued by the legislative branch,” Young said. “Our goal is to ensure the United States maintains its leadership in AI innovation, enabling the American people to reap the substantial national security, economic and societal benefits of an AI-driven future.”
The proposed research funding is the most concrete proposal in the bipartisan AI roadmap, which otherwise reads more like a set of discussion topics rather than a detailed legislative proposal. Its tenets include:
“Ensuring enforcement of existing laws for AI, including ways to address any gaps or unintended harmful bias.””Encouraging a conscientious consideration of the impact AI will have on our workforce.””Addressing national security threats, risks and opportunities for AI.””Addressing challenges posed by deepfakes related to election content and nonconsensual intimate images, as well as examining the impacts of AI on professional content creators and the journalism industry.””Mitigating the threat of potential long-term risk scenarios.”
Given that AI has generated fears of mass layoffs, campaign fraud and the loss of human control over technology, some tech experts were underwhelmed at the roadmap’s lack of, well, roads.
“My overwhelming reaction is disappointment,” Suresh Venkatasubramanian, director of the Center for Technological Responsibility, Reimagination and Redesign at Brown University, told Fast Co.
The Georgetown University School of Law’s Center on Privacy & Tech criticized the roadmap for funding AI research while “failing to build guardrails to protect our communities and planet from its harms.”
And a number of tech groups banded together to release a “Shadow Report” that calls for specific protections against job loss, the invasion of privacy and other possible risks associated with AI.
UB to showcase AI potential to National Science Foundation head at Schumer’s behest
The director of the National Science Foundation will visit the University at Buffalo soon to see how upstate and Western New York can help to drive U.S. research and innovation in order to create new jobs and keep America in the forefront of the new technology.
But to hear Schumer tell it, there was method in the roadmap’s vagueness.
“The only way you get things done in the Senate is bipartisan,” he said. “Now that means on some of the things where I don’t agree with Republicans, like protection for workers or protection for civil rights, we couldn’t have direct proposals.”
Schumer is hoping, though, that while the AI research funding wins congressional approval this year, congressional committees will begin the hard work of developing concrete regulatory proposals that the roadmap deliberately didn’t deliver.
“If it was just Democrats doing it, we might have been able to put those regulations in,” he said. “To do it in a bipartisan way, it takes a little work. You can’t just snap your fingers and make it happen.”
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Washington bureau
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