It’s important that the United States remain the leading 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.

This effort started years ago. In 2018, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) dedicated $1 billion to finding technological breakthroughs and assessing their associated ethical implications. MIT also houses the Media Lab, an initiative addressing the “ethics, inclusivity, sustainability, and justice of technology’s impact on humanity and on the world.”

Already, MIT and the U.S. Air Force have joined forces to find ways to use Artificial Intelligence to help safeguard our national security. The DAF-MIT AI Accelerator aims to create a “state-of-the-art, end-to-end, sustainable pipeline for Artificial Intelligence technology to give the United States a competitive advantage in the defense and civilian sectors.”​

That said, there are differing opinions on the level of AI’s potential impact on our lives. On one hand, there is a huge amount of money flowing into the development of AI. OpenAI, the AI research organization that created ChatGPT, recently raised $6.6 billion, the largest venture-capital raise of all time. That sounds like a lot of dough, but it’s even crazier when you hear that OpenAI is expected to lose $44 billion over the next five years.