US Needs a National AI Strategy: A Sputnik Moment?

The US needs a national AI strategy. Many academic researchers that could contribute to AI research -- including to fundamental new ideas and algorithms, mathematical frameworks for better understanding why some algorithms and architectures work better than others, etc. -- are not able to get involved at the real frontier because they lack the kind of curated data sets and large compute platforms that researchers at Google Brain or DeepMind have access to. Those resources are expensive, but necessary for rapid progress. We need national infrastructure platforms -- similar to physics user facilities like an accelerator or light source or telescope -- in order to support researchers at our universities and national labs doing work in machine learning, AI, and data science.

In contrast, China has articulated a very ambitious national AI plan which has them taking the lead sometime in the 2020s.

Eric Schmidt discusses these points in the video, declaring this a Sputnik moment: