MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
What will happen with the artificial intelligence industry under President-elect Trump? Well, many tech leaders want to know. Some of them are hoping that billionaire Elon Musk serving as a close Trump adviser will boost the AI sector. For more, we're joined by NPR's Bobby Allyn. Hi, Bobby.
BOBBY ALLYN, BYLINE: Hey, Mary Louise.
KELLY: Big picture, what you watching for in terms of what the Trump team might bring for AI companies?
ALLYN: Yeah, you know, from a very high level, it's expected to be a change in tone, right? The Biden administration took a somewhat antagonistic approach to AI, with executive orders and rules aimed at beefing up safety measures. But Trump says he is finding AI advisers from within the AI and tech sector - people like David Sacks. He's a former PayPal executive and longtime venture capitalist. Trump is making him the White House's AI czar. That's someone who can set priorities for AI policy and help shape what federal rules could look like for AI.
And Sriram Krishnan - he's another longtime venture capitalist who has invested in AI companies, and Trump is tapping him as an AI adviser. So these two top picks, Mary Louise, really show that the people who will be shaping AI policies are AI believers and individuals who have invested in AI companies. So Trump's AI policy, you know, is going to be heavily influenced by industry types.
KELLY: OK, so fewer rules, fewer regulations - what might that actually look like in practice?
ALLYN: Well, Congress has never passed a piece of AI legislation, so there are no federal rules in the U.S. right now regulating the AI industry. But the Biden administration has exerted force in other ways. One key way has been through the Federal Trade Commission. It has opened investigations into nearly every big tech company. A lot of these companies are expected to be interested in purchasing smaller, very innovative AI companies in Trump's term, and the Biden administration has not been a fan of such mergers. They made larger - you know, they make larger companies even larger, but, you know, that could soon change.
I talked to John Villasenor. He's a law and public policy professor at UCLA, and he says, expect to see a lot more AI companies being gobbled up by the likes of Meta, Microsoft and OpenAI.
JOHN VILLASENOR: There's going to be, certainly, a much greater willingness for larger, established companies to make offers to buy up-and-coming AI startups. There's been a bit of a chill in the air under the Biden administration's FTC, so I think that'll likely be a lot less aggressively enforced under the Trump administration.
ALLYN: And, you know, critics of consolidation in the tech industry say it can lead to less competition so that the quality of products could potentially get worse over time, and prices for consumers could go up.
KELLY: Bobby, go back to Elon Musk, who, as we know, is playing an outsized role in Trump's transition. Do we know if he's likely to play an outsized role in AI policy once they actually get to the White House?
ALLYN: Yeah. Yeah. Well, on top of heavy-hitter companies that he runs, like Tesla and Space X, Musk has his own AI company called xAI, so he does have a vested interest in policies that could spur more growth for the AI industry. And he wants federal policies to advance the development of autonomous vehicles, and Tesla could have a large role in that. And, you know, Musk has talked about the need to onshore the production of semiconductor chips used to power AI systems.
KELLY: To onshore them - so meaning making them in the U.S., as opposed to Taiwan, where they're mostly made now?
ALLYN: That's exactly right. Ninety percent of the most advanced ones are made there. And now there is bipartisan support for more chip production in the U.S. That was the whole push of the CHIPS Act, which Congress passed. It pumped billions into making the U.S. more competitive globally in the chip sector. But a lot has to be done in order to go toe-to-toe with Taiwan, and AI is just highly, highly dependent, Mary Louise, on these cutting-edge chips that the Trump administration - soon to be, at least - is hoping to make more of in the U.S.
KELLY: NPR's Bobby Allyn - thanks, Bobby.
ALLYN: Thanks, Mary Louise.
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