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As expected, President Donald Trump's administration recently unveiled Winning the Race: AI Action Plan went all in on liberating AI companies to do what they want to make sure "that the United States and its allies win the [AI] race."
Also: Trump's AI plan pushes AI upskilling instead of worker protections - and 4 other key takeaways
What about safety and responsibility? Not so much.
The contradiction...
The AI Action Plan states it is "a national security imperative for the United States to achieve and maintain unquestioned and unchallenged global technological dominance," and then it strongly encourages that "open-source and open-weight AI models are made freely available by developers for anyone in the world to download and modify."
Also: How the Trump administration changed AI: A timeline
Am I the only one seeing a contradiction with "unchallenged technological dominance" and open-source code and models to be made "freely available" for anyone in the world?
Of course, open-source software's track record speaks for itself. According to the January 2024 Harvard Business School study, if companies had to create equivalent technologies, rebuilding open-source software would cost $8.8 trillion. Our servers, our clouds, and pretty much our entire IT infrastructure now run on Linux and open-source software.
Still, open source is a vital catalyst for innovation
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