Big Government and Big Tech team up on Big AI.

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Lily Dramale. Right now the federal government is piloting a response to Silicon Valley's AI boom and

it's using the National AI Research Resource or NARE to do that. The NARE is

supposed to quote democratize access to AI by making gigantic and expensive

AI models available to academic researchers but as Sarah Myers West pointed out in

a recent op-ed in Foreign Policy magazine,

the issue here is the government can't launch its own AI program

without a potentially lucrative partnership with big tech.

You know, the tech industry now is tremendously concentrated, especially in artificial intelligence, in ways

that both the access to resources needed to build AI, but also importantly, all of the incentive structures

in research, in where products that might be developed using these resources get deployed,

all rows kind of lead back to a small handful of large tech firms.

Let's talk more about that.

The pilot version of Nair brings together a number of government agencies like the Department of

Energy, the Department of Defense, as well as big tech companies like open AI anthropic invidious on the list too.

Can you explain the structure of this pilot project?

Yes, so the pilot project contains a few different components.

One is it provides access for researchers who submit applications to be able to use government supercomputers.

It also includes the ability to apply for access to government data sets.

So these are data sets that are held by,

you know, things like the Department of Energy

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