11 25 25 ABC Tech Reporter Mike Dobuski on US AI investment and X location feature

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Gina Goondec on Colorado's Morning News. President Trump launching a
new government effort to boost US research into artificial intelligence,
but it looks like another order that would have preempted
state AI laws is being put on hold. Joining us
on the Kawa Common Spirit Health Hotline for our Tech
Tuesday Chat is ABC News Tech reporter Mike Debuski. Mike,
appreciate your time as always. Okay, explain a little bit

(00:22):
of what we saw from President Trump yesterday, because it
seems like he's launching what's being called a Genesis Mission,
but also there was a push to try to regulate
more what states are doing when it comes to AI laws,
but that seems to be put on holds for right now.

Speaker 2 (00:35):
Does seem that way, So yesterday's sort of Project Genesis
or Genesis Mission that was signed by the President yesterday
was this federal push to get more AI involved in
government research and data. This is something that we know
that large language models like the ones from open AI
and Perplexity and Google and others are pretty good at

(00:56):
summarizing large bits of information, going and looking for specific
things within large texts. Obviously things that scientific researchers would
want to be focused on. However, this larger effort that
the President there had been an effort within the Trump
administration to sign, would have gone a lot further than that.
This was a proposed halt to AI legislation at the

(01:20):
state level. Already, we've seen four states California, Colorado, Utah,
and Texas pass sweeping AI legislation aimed at doing things
like limiting the collection of personal data and forcing AI
companies to be more transparent with the data they do collect.
This draft executive order would have directed federal agencies to

(01:41):
root out burdens state level AI and ultimately discourage states
from passing AI legislation again at the state level. The
overall goal here was to make it a little easier
for AI companies to develop this technology. Instead of having
to negotiate a patchwork of AI legislation at a state level,
it's much easier for AI companies to just deal with

(02:04):
one sort of standardized, sweeping federal legislation. However, this effort
did crop up in legislation that came up before Congress
earlier this year, and it was stripped out of that
before the National Defense Authorization Act was passed. Now, it
appears that the Trump administration was mounting a similar effort
through executive order, but as you mentioned there, Gina, it

(02:26):
does seem like they're backing away from that. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (02:28):
When it came to Colorado's AI regulations bill, I know
they wanted to push for even more but had to
really boil it down and step back and even pause
some of it because they just weren't sure. It's a
first of its kind. It's something brand new that pretty
much everybody's trying to deal with and see where it
goes next. Mike, while we have you, I also want
to talk about this other topic because I think it's fascinating.

(02:48):
Was X launching a new feature when we talk about
locations and where you can see where X accounts are
coming from, and that's caused quite a controversy in the
X realm as of late.

Speaker 2 (02:58):
Yeah, it certainly has. So this is an feature that
X rolled out over the weekend. According to that company,
of course, formerly Twitter. It's designed to provide more transparency
into people's accounts, so you know who you're interacting with online,
and X has gone about that in a couple different ways.
You can see when someone has signed up for the platform,
when they joined the app, that has kind of been

(03:19):
around for a little while. Now you can also see
now how many times a given account has changed their username.
And as you mentioned, you can now click into a
person's account and see where they're posting from. The specificity
of that is pretty broad, it's limited to a country,
but even still, that has sparked a lot of interesting

(03:40):
conversations on that platform in the last few days. A
lot of this has to do with, you know, people
clicking into accounts posting about politics, specifically American politics, only
to find that the accounts that they're following comes from
Nigeria or Southeast Asia. For example, there was one account
with over two hundred thousand followers last week called a
Maria can Voice, sort of a political, you know, right

(04:03):
leaning account on x This update rolled out and followers
found it was being run from somewhere in South Asia.
And now that account has since been deleted by the
owner of that account. And now there was another account
that posted about President Trump's daughter, Avanka Trump, and according
to this feature, it's based in Nigeria, and an account
called a boom Oh Gaza, which, according to this profiles

(04:24):
a Gaza based journalist. Though according to this new feature,
is actually based in Poland. In that particular case, Gina
the account posted a video a few days ago. It
appeared to be from war torn Gaza. It is seemingly
in an effort to push back on commentors saying this
was a fake account, but even then x users raised
the idea that the video could be fake. ABC has

(04:44):
not confirmed either way, but even still, this really does
underscore just how confusing it has been for a lot
of x users in the last few days, and just
how many accounts which seemed to be posting about American
things are actually find their originswhere else.

Speaker 1 (05:00):
ABC News Tech Reporter, It's Mike Tubuski. Thanks Mike, have
a good holiday.

Speaker 2 (05:04):
Of course you too.