Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories

The AI Race We Need: For a Better Future, Not Against Another Nation

The AI Race We Need: For a Better Future, Not Against Another Nation

The concept of AI hovering among the public.

Getty Images, J Studios

The AI race that warrants the lion’s share of our attention and resources is not the one with China. Both superpowers should stop hurriedly pursuing AI advances for the sake of “beating” the other. We’ve seen such a race before. Both participants lose. The real race is against an unacceptable status quo: declining lifespans, increasing income inequality, intensifying climate chaos, and destabilizing politics. That status quo will drag on, absent the sorts of drastic improvements AI can bring about. AI may not solve those problems but it may accelerate our ability to improve collective well-being. That’s a race worth winning.

Geopolitical races have long sapped the U.S. of realizing a better future sooner. The U.S. squandered scarce resources and diverted talented staff to close the alleged missile gap with the USSR. President Dwight D. Eisenhower rightfully noted, “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” He realized that every race comes at an immense cost. In this case, the country was “spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.”


President John F. Kennedy failed to heed the guidance of his predecessor. He initiated yet another geopolitical contest by publicly challenging the USSR to a space race. Privately, he too knew that such a race required substantial trade-offs. Before Sputnik, Kennedy scoffed at spending precious funds on space endeavors. Following the Bay of Pigs Invasion, Kennedy reversed course. In his search for a political win, he found space. The rest, of course, is history. It’s true that the nation’s pursuit of the moon generated significant direct and indirect benefits. What’s unknowable, though, is what benefits could have been realized if Kennedy pursued his original science agenda: large-scale desalination of seawater. That bold endeavor would have also created spin-off improvements in related fields.

Decades from now, the true “winner” of the AI race will be the country that competes in the only race that really matters—tackling the most pressing economic, social, and political problems. The country that wins that race will have a richer, healthier, and more resilient population. That country will endure when crises unfold. Others will crumble.

AI development and deployment involve finite resources. The chips, energy, and expertise that go into creating leading AI models are in short supply. Chips accumulated by OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and other massive AI labs to train the next frontier model are chips not being used to address more socially useful ends. Likewise, an AI expert working on a new AI-driven missile system is an expert not working on how AI can solve problems that have long been put on the back burner in the name of winning the geopolitical race of the moment.

Imagine the good that could come about if instead of prioritizing the pursuit of an unreachable AI frontier, we turned already impressive models toward the problems that will shape our long-term communal success. Early signs suggest that a pivot to this race would immediately improve the status quo. First, consider the potential for rapid improvements in health brought about by better, more affordable drugs. According to the Boston Consulting Group, AI-based discoveries or designs have spurred 67 clinical trials of new drugs. AstraZeneca reported that AI had cut its drug discovery process from years to months.

Second, consider the possibility of providing every student with personalized tutoring—setting us on a path to again become the most educated and productive workforce the world over. AI programs deployed in Bhutan helped students learn math skills in a fraction of the time when compared to classmates who received traditional math instruction. Closer to home, Khanmigo— an AI platform designed by the Khan Academy —is giving students personalized lessons in 266 school districts across the United States.

Third, and finally, consider a world in which traffic fatalities were halved thanks to the broader adoption of autonomous vehicles. Autonomous Vehicle (AV) companies have leveraged AI to make rapid advances in the ability of their vehicles to drive in all conditions. Further focus on these efforts may finally make AVs the majority of cars on the road and, as a result, save thousands of lives.

To redirect our AI race toward societal benefit, we need concrete policy changes. Federal research funding should prioritize AI applications targeting our most pressing challenges—healthcare access, energy development, and educational opportunities. Complementing this approach, tax incentives could reward companies that deploy AI for measurable social impact rather than pure market dominance. Additionally, public-private partnerships, similar to the one between Texas A&M and NVIDIA involving the creation of a high-performance supercomputer, could create innovation hubs focused specifically on using AI to solve regional problems, from drought management in the Southwest to infrastructure resilience on the coasts.

The choice before us is clear: we can continue the myopic pursuit of AI superiority for its own sake, or we can choose the wiser race—one toward a more innovative and prosperous future. History will not judge us by which nation first reached some arbitrary artificial intelligence threshold but by how we wielded this transformative technology to solve problems that have plagued humanity for generations. By redirecting our finite resources—chips, energy, and human ingenuity—toward these challenges, we can ensure that the true winners of the AI revolution will be all of us, not merely one flag or another. That is a victory worth pursuing with the full measure of our national commitment and creativity.


Kevin Frazier is an AI Innovation and Law Fellow at Texas Law and Author of the Appleseed AI substack.

Read More

Entertainment Can Improve How Democrats and Republicans See Each Other

Since the development of American mass media culture in the mid-20th century, numerous examples of entertainment media have tried to improve attitudes towards those who have traditionally held little power.

Getty Images, skynesher

Entertainment Can Improve How Democrats and Republicans See Each Other

Entertainment has been used for decades to improve attitudes toward other groups, both in the U.S. and abroad. One can think of movies like Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, helping change attitudes toward Black Americans, or TV shows like Rosanne, helping humanize the White working class. Efforts internationally show that media can sometimes improve attitudes toward two groups concurrently.

Substantial research shows that Americans now hold overly negative views of those across the political spectrum. Let's now learn from decades of experience using entertainment to improve attitudes of those in other groups—but also from counter-examples that have reinforced stereotypes and whose techniques should generally be avoided—in order to improve attitudes toward fellow Americans across politics. This entertainment can allow Americans across the political spectrum to have more accurate views of each other while realizing that successful cross-ideological friendships and collaborations are possible.

Keep ReadingShow less
Congress Must Not Undermine State Efforts To Regulate AI Harms to Children
Congress Must Not Undermine State Efforts To Regulate AI Harms to Children
Getty Images, Dmytro Betsenko

Congress Must Not Undermine State Efforts To Regulate AI Harms to Children

A cornerstone of conservative philosophy is that policy decisions should generally be left to the states. Apparently, this does not apply when the topic is artificial intelligence (AI).

In the name of promoting innovation, and at the urging of the tech industry, Congress quietly included in a 1,000-page bill a single sentence that has the power to undermine efforts to protect against the dangers of unfettered AI development. The sentence imposes a ten-year ban on state regulation of AI, including prohibiting the enforcement of laws already on the books. This brazen approach crossed the line even for conservative U.S. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who remarked, “We have no idea what AI will be capable of in the next 10 years, and giving it free rein and tying states' hands is potentially dangerous.” She’s right. And it is especially dangerous for children.

Keep ReadingShow less
Microphones, podcast set up, podcast studio.

Many people inside and outside of the podcasting world are working to use the medium as a way to promote democracy and civic engagement.

Getty Images, Sergey Mironov

Ben Rhodes on How Podcasts Can Strengthen Democracy

After the 2024 election was deemed the “podcast election,” many people inside and outside of the podcasting world were left wondering how to capitalize on the medium as a way to promote democracy and civic engagement to audiences who are either burned out by or distrustful of traditional or mainstream news sources.

The Democracy Group podcast network has been working through this question since its founding in 2020—long before presidential candidates appeared on some of the most popular podcasts to appeal to specific demographics. Our members recently met in Washington, D.C., for our first convening to learn from each other and from high-profile podcasters like Jessica Tarlov, host of Raging Moderates, and Ben Rhodes, host of Pod Save the World.

Keep ReadingShow less
True Confessions of an AI Flip Flopper
Ai technology, Artificial Intelligence. man using technology smart robot AI, artificial intelligence by enter command prompt for generates something, Futuristic technology transformation.
Getty Images - stock photo

True Confessions of an AI Flip Flopper

A few years ago, I would have agreed with the argument that the most important AI regulatory issue is mitigating the low probability of catastrophic risks. Today, I’d think nearly the opposite. My primary concern is that we will fail to realize the already feasible and significant benefits of AI. What changed and why do I think my own evolution matters?

Discussion of my personal path from a more “safety” oriented perspective to one that some would label as an “accelerationist” view isn’t important because I, Kevin Frazier, have altered my views. The point of walking through my pivot is instead valuable because it may help those unsure of how to think about these critical issues navigate a complex and, increasingly, heated debate. By sharing my own change in thought, I hope others will feel welcomed to do two things: first, reject unproductive, static labels that are misaligned with a dynamic technology; and, second, adjust their own views in light of the wide variety of shifting variables at play when it comes to AI regulation. More generally, I believe that calling myself out for a so-called “flip-flop” may give others more leeway to do so without feeling like they’ve committed some wrong.

Keep ReadingShow less