WASHINGTON, May 8, 2018 — The White House on Tuesday announced it would hold an Artificial Intelligence summit, which will “bring together over 100 senior government officials, technical experts from top academic institutions, heads of industrial research labs, and American business leaders who are now adopting these emerging technologies to benefit their customers, workers, and shareholders.”
The event will take place Thursday, May 10, and is being organized by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. It will be hosted by Michael Kratsios, who serves as the U.S. Deputy Chief Technology Officer and as President Trump’s Deputy Assistant for Technology Policy.
Kratsios, 31, serves as Trump’s technology adviser at OSTP, which is part of the Executive Office of the President. OSTP has a broad mandate to advise the president on the effects of science and technology on national and international affairs.
Under Trump, the OSTP has largely been neglected since the former real estate mogul and reality TV star took office. While the office boasted a staff of 135 people under former director John Holdren, who held Kratsios’ job and ran the agency under then-President Barack Obama, Trump’s OSTP — which is being run currently by Ted Wackler, a career civil servant — has only around 57 people on staff, according to spokesperson Ross Gillfillan.
Kratsios lacks the advanced academic degrees held by his predecessors at OSTP
While previous people in his position have held advanced degrees, including Obama tech adviser John Holdren, who had a Ph.D. from Stanford, Kratsios holds only a bachelor’s degree in political science and a certificate in Hellenic studies from Princeton University.
His experience with technology is limited to having spent time working for venture capital firms in Silicon Valley, where among other things he served as chief of staff to Peter Thiel, a prominent supporter of President Trump who is known for being an early investor in Facebook.
Thiel, it was later revealed, funded the invasion of privacy lawsuit by Terry Bollea — better known as Hulk Hogan — which forced Gawker Media into bankruptcy after a jury returned a $140 million verdict against the company. The dispute was later settled for $31 million. Gawker Media had previously published unflattering articles about Thiel, and appeared to publicly “out” the entrepreneur as gay in 2007.
Summit comes at a time of growing anxiety about China’s AI capabilities
Thursday’s event will take place in the shadow of a looming behemoth: A Chinese government that has embraced AI as a national priority, even as the current U.S. administration gives science and technology matters short shrift compared with its predecessor.
Last July, China announced plans to become the world leader in AI by 2030 by playing midwife to an AI industry it hopes will be worth $150 billion. An English translation of the announcement compared the project to the U.S. race to the moon in the 1960s.
While the U.S. government under President Obama released a similar report by the National Science and Technology Council in October, 2016, President Trump has expressed little interest in technology policy matters.
According to the White House, planned topics for discussion will include AI research and development (R&D), workforce development, regulatory barriers to AI innovation, and sector-specific applications of AI. Industry attendees will include executives from diverse business sectors including technology, food and agriculture, energy and manufacturing, financial services, healthcare, and transportation and logistics.
(An earlier version of this story listed Michael Kratsios as Director of OSTP. While Kratsios is Trump’s technology adviser, Deputy Chief of Staff Ted Wackler currently runs OSTP in lieu of a permanent director)
