When President Joe Biden has questions about artificial intelligence, one expert he turns to is his science adviser Arati Prabhakar, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
Prabhakar is helping to guide the U.S. approach to safeguarding AI technology, relying in part on cooperation from big American tech firms like Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Meta.
The India-born, Texas-raised engineer and applied physicist is coming at the problem from a career bridging work in government — including leading the Defense Department’s advanced technology research arm — and the private sector as a former Silicon Valley executive and venture capitalist.
She spoke with The Associated Press earlier this month ahead of a White House-organized test of AI systems at the DefCon hacker convention in Las Vegas. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: Does the president come to ask you about AI?
A: I’ve had the great privilege of talking with him several times about artificial intelligence. Those are great conversations because he’s laser-focused on understanding what it is and how people are using it. Then immediately he just goes to the consequences and deep implications. Those have been some very good conversations. Very exploratory, but also very focused on action.
Q: Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (who’s pushing for AI regulations) says making AI models explainable is a priority. How realistic is that?
A: It’s a technical feature of these deep-learning, machine-learning systems, that they are opaque. They are black box in nature. But most of the risks we deal with as human beings come from things that are not explainable. As an example, I take a medicine every single day. While I can’t actually predict exactly how it’s going to interact with the cells in my body, we have found ways to make pharmaceuticals safe enough. Think about drugs before we had clinical trials. You could hawk some powder or syrup and it might make…
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