State of China A.I. and...Tesla opens a Diner!

ABC's Mike Dobuski has the latest tech news including a proposal of a unified A.I. coalition based in China

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
I'm a legacy retirement Group dot com phone line on AI.

Speaker 2 (00:04):
Once again, it is Mikedbusky, ABC News Tech Reporter. It's
Tech Tuesday and Mike. In Shanghai there was the World
Artificial Intelligence Conference.

Speaker 1 (00:14):
I wonder what kind of food they had over there.
That's a good question.

Speaker 3 (00:16):
I don't actually know what kind of food they had
over there, but yeah, you're absolutely right. Over the weekend,
China held what is known as the WAIIC or the
World Artificial Intelligence Conference. Here in the US in Las Vegas.
Every year we have the Consumer Electronics Show. This is
like the Consumer Electronics Show for AI. It's been taking
place for the last eight years in Shanghai, and it

(00:36):
attracts some pretty big figures from around the world of tech,
including former Google CEO Eric Schmidt this year. Jeffrey Hinton,
who is a Nobel laureate often referred to as the
Godfather of AI. Elon Musk has spoken at this conference
in the past, though he was not there this year.
And it is a tech conference, so you see a
lot of exhibitors, about eight hundred of them this year

(00:57):
according to organizers, three thousand AI related products that includes
forty large language models, fifty AI hardware devices and sixty
robots that use AI in some capacity. But the big
news this year was the announcement from the Chinese Premier
Lee Chang in a speech, and he called for the
creation of a global AI organization. Some have kind of

(01:21):
referred to this as like a United Nations of Ai,
saying that the AI race is basically too fragmented, too
much information is being held behind closed doors, and that
creates the space for AI to be developed in an
unsafe way. That's why China now wants to create this
centralized multinational body full of heads of state and leading
lights throughout the industry and academics to govern and support

(01:47):
the development and use of AI. Lee said that China
specifically is looking at the development of open source AI,
which is AI that you can go to the source
code of and modify and change and use in your
own products if you want. And he's suggested that this
organization could be headquartered in Shanghai, of all places, and
that establishing something like this could prevent the AI race

(02:07):
from becoming the exclusive game of a few countries and companies.
Never explicitly mentioning the US there, but the implication was
pretty strong.

Speaker 2 (02:16):
Didn't the Trump administration just kind of reveal an AI
action plan a couple of days ago.

Speaker 3 (02:22):
Yeah, this timing is interesting, right, the White House releasing
its AI action Plan on Wednesday of last week. This
is a twenty four page outline of about ninety federal
actions that could be taken, and they kind of boil
down to three main categories. One is increasing private sector innovation,
so that means cutting back regulations and relying on the

(02:43):
private sector, relying on figures in Silicon Valley to recommend
which rules to cut back on. So that's part one.
Part two is expanding AI related infrastructure. You can think
here about like expanding data centers in the US semiconductor production,
but also removing what the Trump administration says are hurdles

(03:04):
to the development of AI in their estimation, and that
means diversity, equity and inclusion programs, climate requirements, and one
executive order targeted what the White House described as woke
artificial intelligence models. So that's kind of what's on their
mind for part two. Part three is exporting American AI.
So this also involves things like semiconductors, computer chips, but

(03:26):
also getting someone thinking about the national security risks involved
in some of these models, maybe the potential for this
to be used for some real harm on a global scale.
That's the White House's point of view. A lot of
consumer advocates have pushed back specifically on part one, saying
that this gives companies in Silicon Valley a little too
much leeway to govern themselves. They call it a corporate

(03:46):
giveaway according to Public Citizen, but the Trump administration says
this is crucial to winning the AI race against global competitors,
particularly in China.

Speaker 1 (03:55):
So the Trump administration plan was to like deregulate.

Speaker 2 (03:58):
I thought it would have been the other way is, hey,
we need to put some guidelines in here and some
guardrails to make sure that we don't lose control of
the AI race here.

Speaker 1 (04:06):
But it's actually the other way around.

Speaker 3 (04:08):
It is, and it is a really big deregulatory effort,
and specifically allowing the companies to kind of recommend to
the government what to cut is something that has gotten
a lot of attention. Again, to go back to that
Public Citizen pushback, kind of what they said here was
that the Trump Administration's reckless AI agenda prioritizes corporate profits

(04:29):
over public safety. And the administration plans to give billions
to big tech so that they can burn even more
dirty energy, release untested products, and rush into the AI
era without accountability.

Speaker 1 (04:40):
That is kind of the tone of the.

Speaker 3 (04:43):
Criticism, sure, right, that's where they're coming at this from.
It also really cuts against this open source idea from China,
which is, you know, hey, everyone should be able to
look at everyone's AI products and then sort of iterate
as a collective, whereas in the United States, it seems
the way that they're thinking about this is we just
have to let the markets decide. We have to let
the companies kind of you know, push forward, compete against

(05:05):
one another, because that's the way that we're going to
create the best AI products, create the safest AI products,
and ultimately win the global AI race.

Speaker 2 (05:13):
I think one of the big things you touched upon,
Mike Tbuski, ABC News Technology Reporter, is the energy that
is used to create AI and all, you know, look,
if my energy bill goes up because of AI, I've
got a problem. I don't want to pay for you know,
your AI project necessarily through my electric bills. So that's
something that I think needs to be addressed. No doubt

(05:34):
about it talk about Tesla.

Speaker 1 (05:37):
What they're now. They're doing other things besides just building evs. Yeah,
that's right.

Speaker 3 (05:42):
So in the last week, the Tesla Diner was unveiled
in Los Angeles. This is an idea that's been germinating
since about twenty eighteen or so. Elon Musk calls it
an old school drive in with roller skates and rock
and roll, and it is a diner, you know, at
its core, but it is a very retro future sort
of Tesla take on a diner. It's all silver on

(06:03):
the outside, kind of looks like a big UFO. It's
got you know, burgers and hot dogs and milkshakes, your
typical diner fair. They also have something on the menu
called epic Bacon, which is some internet humor straight out
of twenty ten for you. There there's a drive in
movie theater component to it. You can charge your Tesla
while watching, you know, Star Wars. Apparently it was one
of the movies in rotation. But guys, the important bit

(06:23):
of context here is that this sort of flashy new
diner comes on the heels of a pretty disappointing earnings
report from Tesla, the automaker, finding that revenue fell sixteen
percent from April to June. That's automotive revenue. Overall revenue
for the company was down twelve percent, according to that
most recent earnings report,