Why wouldn't the US Government invest billions of dollars in a technology that it sees as essential? What's FUD-y about that? Most of our industry itself is the result of the US Government's past investments for military-related purposes.
Later edit: Also, article from 2016 [1]
> There’s more to the Allen & Co annual Sun Valley mogul gathering than talk about potential media deals: The industry’s corporate elite spent this morning listening to a panel about advances in artificial intelligence, following sessions yesterday dealing with education, biotech and gene splicing, and the status of Middle East.
> Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen led the AI session with LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman and Y Combinator’s Sam Altman. The main themes: AI will affect lots of businesses, and it’s coming quickly.
> Yesterday’s sessions included one with former CIA director George Tenant who spoke about the Middle East and terrorism with New York Police Department Deputy Commissioner of Intelligence & Counter-terrorism John Miller and a former chief of Israeli intelligence agency Mossad.
So, yes, all the intelligence agencies are pretty involved in this AI thing, they'd be stupid not to be.
Now seven years later Will Hurd and George Tenet are currently the managing director and chairman respectively of Allen & Co! More facts worth considering are in the mysterious hacker news comment from the other day:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35366484
Allen & Co was also the “boutique investment bank” (as the media was calling them back then) that was involved in the acquisition of WhatsApp by Facebook. Archived WSJ source for it [1]
Later edit: Also, article from 2016 [1]
> There’s more to the Allen & Co annual Sun Valley mogul gathering than talk about potential media deals: The industry’s corporate elite spent this morning listening to a panel about advances in artificial intelligence, following sessions yesterday dealing with education, biotech and gene splicing, and the status of Middle East.
> Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen led the AI session with LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman and Y Combinator’s Sam Altman. The main themes: AI will affect lots of businesses, and it’s coming quickly.
> Yesterday’s sessions included one with former CIA director George Tenant who spoke about the Middle East and terrorism with New York Police Department Deputy Commissioner of Intelligence & Counter-terrorism John Miller and a former chief of Israeli intelligence agency Mossad.
So, yes, all the intelligence agencies are pretty involved in this AI thing, they'd be stupid not to be.
[1] https://deadline.com/2016/07/sun-valley-moguls-artificial-in...