What critics get wrong about the "American AI Initiative"

There’s been a bit of hysteria — AI-steria, if you will — over the Trump administration’s recently issued American AI Initiative, formally known as “Executive Order on Maintaining American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence.”The initiative is a broad strategy “to sustain and enhance the scientific, technological, and economic leadership position of the United States in AI R&D and deployment.” But critics have complained it’s short on specific actions and lacks new funding to accomplish its goals, in contrast to China’s 2017 “Next Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan,” which allocated billions to establish China as the “premier global AI innovation center” by 2030.As Babson College professor Thomas Davenport noted in a recent essay in The Conversation:One Chinese state alone has said it will devote $5 billion to developing AI technologies and businesses. “The American AI Initiative’s focus on prioritizing research and development, responsibly leveraging data as a national resource and investing in an AI-ready workforce will bring new energy to our national innovation ecosystem,” the university said in a statement.All of this points to the reality that the private sector, as has been the case so many times throughout the annals of U.S. innovation, is taking the lead in AI and counting on entrepreneurial spirit rather than government largesse to win the day.As a Bloomberg editorial put it: “This contrasts favorably with (say) China, where the government is pumping billions of dollars directly into AI-related companies.