Artificial Intelligence
The Bottom Line
It’s critical that the United States remain the dominant force in Artificial Intelligence (AI).
This can be scary stuff, but the good news is that, if we are proactive, we can maintain control over how AI advances instead of being vulnerable to forces beyond our control.
This nation has not only survived but thrived navigating colossal changes before – from the Industrial Revolution to the Digital Revolution – but never have we tried to craft regulations as intricate as those involved with AI. Regulating AI is tricky because we must balance the many benefits with a large variety of risks – all without stifling AI’s progress.
There is no precedent for this. Because we are at such a critical moment – and because this is so incredibly complex – a patchwork of state laws across the country will not cut it. We need a single, comprehensive regulatory framework. Rules and regulations cannot be fragmented; we need consistency.
This can be done! Government can absolutely be a stabilizing force here, providing safety measures to prevent harm to Americans without imposing harsh regulations that would be a drag on innovation.
There are differing opinions on the level of AI’s potential impact on our lives, particularly regarding jobs. 1787 believes changes will have to be made but is not in a total panic over this. Of course, AI is going to have an impact on the U.S. job market and, or course, we must prepare for that in every way possible. But we look at it more like a major shift than a total disruption (and this was already happening thanks to technological advancements like automation). Read about 1787’s Plan of Action for American jobs here.
Among the most important conversations we must have are ones about bias, discrimination, consumer privacy, and the social/ethical implications of AI. For example, how can we make sure facial recognition technology is never utilized in a racially biased manner? And who should be held responsible – and what should the consequences be – when an automated system goes on an antisemitic rant and spreads conspiracy theories about Jewish people like X’s Grok chatbot has? It’s critical we establish ethical frameworks that ensure AI enhances our global strength and is beneficial for society overall.
Although most everyone has opinions on the level of AI’s potential impact, certain negative consequences are undeniable because they are already disturbingly evident. For example, content generated by AI is beginning to threaten our democratic process, particularly American elections and those around the world.
Another threat is something called “model collapse,” which refers to the declining performance of GenAI models that are trained primarily on AI-generated content (i.e., synthetic content produced by other AI models) instead of legitimate human knowledge. These Al models begin to lose originality, accuracy, and effectiveness – ultimately polluting the training set of the next generation.
AI consumes a massive amount of energy. Data centers often use more electricity than a million homes.
It’s critical that the United States remain the dominant force in Artificial Intelligence (AI). The 2024 AI Index Report, an independent initiative at Stanford University, says that the U.S. tops China, the European Union and the United Kingdom as the leading source of top AI models by far, with 61 notable AI models coming from U.S.-based institutions, compared to 21 from the European Union and 15 from China.
But then, in January 2025, America was blindsided by the Chinese scrappy startup DeepSeek’s latest AI model. Although the tech itself was comparable to models recently released by U.S. companies, it was built with less computing power and less money…. and, in the blink of an eye, DeepSeek-R1 challenged the assumption that the United States was the dominant, undisputed force in AI.
DeepSeek-R1 triggered a financial panic, erasing a trillion dollars of market value in a single day. The day before its release, Nvidia – the dominant computational chip dealer for the AI boom – was the most valuable company in the world. In the days after the release, it lost $593 billion of value, a loss greater than the entire market cap of ExxonMobil and the worst day for any stock in history. (Note: That said, in July 2025, Nvidia became the first public company worth $4 trillion and, three months later, the first to reach $5 trillion).
DeepSeek-R1 stoked fear from Wall Street to Silicon Valley, and it signaled to the entire world that the battle between the United States and China for tech supremacy had only just begun.
One of the most remarkable things about DeepSeek’s new model is the advancements it made in “reasoning,” a major factor in how close AI can come to achieving human-level intelligence. The breakthrough was not if the chatbot can “reason,” but how it “reasons.” Instead of just regurgitating information, it seems to have an actual thought-process. Think about it like this: One tech columnist asked the chatbot if a hot dog is a sandwich. She reported that it spent “28 seconds contemplating the philosophical meaning of processed meat between bread” then said, “First, I need to understand what defines a sandwich.”
But let’s not lose faith, America! We are still exceptional at this. While the 2025 AI Index Report from Stanford acknowledges that China is closing the performance and quality gap – and leads in AI publications and patents – it says that the United States “still leads in producing top AI models” producing “40 notable AI models, compared to China’s 15 and Europe’s three.”
… and never fear, there is a MASSIVE amount of money flowing into the development of American-based AI. In October 2024, OpenAI, the AI research organization that created ChatGPT, announced they had raised $6.6 billion, then the largest venture-capital raise of all time. That sounds like a lot of dough, but it’s even crazier when you hear that the investors knew full well that OpenAI was expected to lose $44 billion over the following five years.
Together, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta Platforms, and Microsoft invested $230 billion in AI technologies in 2024. In 2025, Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft are expected to spend $320 billion on infrastructure costs alone. Not only are these companies building $100 billion+ data centers, but they are also spending outrageously on talent.
These gigantic investments obviously signal a bullish outlook on AI’s capabilities. Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic – an AI public benefit startup founded by two former employees of OpenAI – is convinced that “powerful AI” will exceed human intelligence by 2026. The AI Futures Project – a team led by Daniel Kokotajlo, a former OpenAI researcher – predicts “the impact of superhuman AI over the next decade will be enormous, exceeding that of the Industrial Revolution.”
On the other hand, some people believe the hype surrounding AI is being blown way out of proportion, particularly when it comes to its ability to conquer sensory/motor skills and logical reasoning.
In 1988, Hans Moravec, a computer scientist and current adjunct faculty member at the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University, crystalized the challenge: “It is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult level performance on intelligence tests or playing checkers, but difficult or impossible to give them the skills of a one-year-old when it comes to perception and mobility… Encoded in the large, highly evolved sensory and motor portions of the human brain is a billion years of experience about the nature of the world and how to survive in it.”