(ConservativeJournal.org) – On October 30, President Biden issued what is being called a “sweeping executive order” concerning the implementation of artificial intelligence technology in a host of industrial, commercial and governmental applications. The order is reported to set AI safety standards for the overall economy, public health sector and U.S. national security.
Two days later, Newsweek published a piece in which the outlet divulged that the federal government has awarded around $30 million in grants to a Chinese computer scientist whom they describe as being at the helm of the communist nation’s AI development programs. The researcher, Song-Chun Zhu, once ran the University of California’s AI center at their Los Angeles campus.
While stateside, Zhu was on the receiving end of Pentagon funding. During his time at UCLA, Newsweek reports that the scientist established “a parallel institute” very close to a city many may recognize the name of, that of Wuhan. Not long after doing so, Zhu resigned from his position at UCLA and moved back to China, where he began conducting military-based research for the Chinese Communist Party.
Although the magazine clarifies that they have no evidence to suggest that Zhu is guilty of having broken any U.S. laws, they do point out that the nature of his work and the potential conflicts of interest it could pose were reported to American intelligence agencies. According to the outlet, while most of his grants were awarded while he was stateside, he still received funding after having arrived back in China in 2020.
Newsweek reports that in 2021, the Department of Defense continued to fund his Sino-based research with two grants worth a combined $1.2 million. The first grant was for the development of “high-level robot autonomy” and the other was slated for “cognitive robot platforms.”
In 2020, President Trump instituted a ban on certain Chinese graduate students. Those with ties to their nation’s military were barred from American universities.
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