Schumer sees Buffalo on Senate AI ‘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 multifaceted efforts in AI, including as as the base of the state’s Empire AI research center.

Then again, universities around the world are investing 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 ‘AI – can help Buffalo. After all, it is only a roadmap, which has attracted widespread criticism for its lack of detailed regulation for a technology that could both create and destroy jobs while blurring the line between truth and reality.

But Schumer is confident his bipartisan AI efforts will lead to a brighter future for Western New York and the country. He compares the nascent AI efforts to his years-long effort to bring the microchip industry back to the United States. The CHIPS and Science Act took effect in 2022, creating the “technology hub” program and prompting Micron to commit to building a massive factory near Syracuse that will eventually employ 9,000 people.

“All the research we’ve done with CHIPS, making Buffalo a technology hub, will come together and make us well-suited to handle AI as well,” he said. “What we did with CHIPS was design a proposal that meets the needs of upstate and western New York. We are trying to do the same thing with AI.

The federal government designated Buffalo-Rochester-Syracuse as a technology hub last October, making the region eligible for more than $75 million in federal funding. Schumer met with Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo last week and expressed confidence the region will receive at least some of that money when funding is announced in the coming weeks.

Additionally, Schumer said the microchips that Micron will make at its new upstate facility will be necessary ingredients in the AI ​​tools of the future, including those developed at UB.

The university’s efforts are considerable. The state will notably invest $275 million over a decade in Empire AI, which will have a computing center at UB. But other AI announcements regularly come from the university, the most recent – ​​a $1.8 million federal grant to UB researchers who will work to secure AI systems in the military American – was announced on 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 additional research funding is the part of the AI ​​roadmap most likely to pass Congress this year, given that it has bipartisan support and could fit nicely into federal funding bills for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1.

The bipartisan Senate AI Task Force developed the roadmap after a year of research and meetings with top technology leaders and others potentially affected by the growth of AI. Sen. Todd Young, an Indiana Republican who was on the task force, praised the plan.

“This roadmap represents the most comprehensive and impactful bipartisan recommendations on artificial intelligence ever issued by the Legislature,” Young said. “Our goal is to ensure that the United States maintains its leadership in AI innovation, enabling the American people to reap the substantial national security, economic and societal benefits of a future focused on AI. »

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 principles include:

• “Ensuring enforcement of existing AI laws, including ways to close any gaps or unintended harmful biases.”
• “Encourage deep thinking about the impact AI will have on our workforce. »
• “Addressing National Security Threats, Risks, and Opportunities for AI.”
• “Addressing the challenges posed by deepfakes related to election content and non-consensual intimate images, as well as examining the impacts of AI on professional content creators and the journalism industry.”
• “Mitigate the threat of potential long-term risk scenarios. »

As AI has sparked fears of mass layoffs, election fraud and loss of human control over the technology, some technology experts have been disappointed by the roadmap’s lack of routes.

“My overwhelming reaction is disappointment,” Suresh Venkatasubramanian, director of the Center for Technology Responsibility, Reimagining and Reimagining at Brown University, told Fast Co.

Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown University Law School criticized the roadmap to fund AI research while “failing to build safeguards to protect our communities and our planet from its harms”.

And a number of tech groups have banded together to release a “shadow report” that calls for specific protections against job loss, invasion of privacy, and other possible risks associated with AI.

But to hear Schumer tell it, there was method in the vagueness of the road map.

“The only way to get things done in the Senate is with bipartisanship,” he said. “That means that on some things that I don’t agree with Republicans on, like worker protections or civil rights protections, we can’t have direct proposals.”

Schumer hopes, however, that even as AI research funding gains congressional approval this year, congressional committees will begin the hard work of developing concrete regulatory proposals that the road map deliberately did not have. outfits.

“If only Democrats had done it, maybe we could have introduced these regulations,” 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.