The White House on Wednesday reiterated its call to defend its artificial intelligence lead against a quickly advancing China by exporting “cohesive AI tech stacks” that integrate not just chips but also algorithms and applications to foreign countries.
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Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, told a Senate subcommittee hearing that the US once commanded a “comfortable” lead in AI over closest competitors, such as China, in 2020, but by 2024 the gap had begun to “close significantly”.
“We stood in danger of losing our pre-eminence in this critical technology,” he said.
A tech stack is a collection of technologies – including advanced semiconductor chips and algorithms – used to develop an application. The importance of exporting full AI stacks is cited in the Trump administration’s July AI Action Plan.
Greater exports of American AI tech stacks, he said, would be instrumental in preventing China from amassing market share globally, undercutting the growth of US rivals.
“To have a cohesive, successful AI ecosystem, you have to have the physical compute to run large language models and applications built on top of those … Whatever use cases may be, they need to be developed as part of a larger cohesive stack,” Kratsios said.
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He said his office aims to work with the Commerce Department to flesh out more details regarding these tech stacks as “one of the most important actions” of America’s latest action plan on AI.
The administration plan also directs the defence and commerce departments to coordinate with allies on adopting US export controls and to keep American adversaries out of their defence supply chains.