someday In March 2023, Arati Prabhakar brought a laptop into the Oval Office and showed Joe Biden the future. Six months later, the president issued a comprehensive executive order setting the regulatory course for AI.
This all happened because ChatGPT amazed the world. It immediately became very, very obvious that the United States needed to accelerate its efforts to regulate the AI industry and take action to benefit from it. While the potential benefits were limitless (Social Security customer service works!), there were also potential downsides, such as floods of disinformation or even, according to some, human extinction. Someone had to show this to the president.
The job fell to Prabhakar because she is the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and holds Cabinet status as chief adviser on science and technology to the president; She had already systematically educated top officials about the transformative power of AI. But she also has the experience and bureaucratic skills to make an impression on the most powerful person in the world.
Prabhakar was born in India and grew up in Texas. He earned his doctorate in applied physics from Caltech and previously led two U.S. agencies: the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency. She also spent 15 years as a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley, including as president of Interval Research, Paul Allen’s legendary technology incubator, and was vice president or chief technology officer at several companies.
Prabhakar started her current job in October 2022 – just in time to put AI on the agenda – and helped push through this 20,000-word regulation that mandates safety standards, encourages innovation, promotes AI in government and education, and even attempts to prevent job losses mitigate. She replaced biologist Eric Lander, who resigned after an investigation found he ran a toxic workplace. Prabhakar is the first person of color and the first woman to be named head of the office.
We talked at the kitchen table of Prabhakar’s Silicon Valley condo—a simply furnished space that, if I remember correctly, is quite different from the OSTP offices in the spooky, intimidating Eisenhower Executive Office Building in DC. Luckily, the California atmosphere prevailed and our conversation felt very relaxed – relaxed even. We talked about how Bruce Springsteen played a role in Biden’s first ChatGPT demo, her hopes for a renaissance of the semiconductor industry in the US, and why Biden’s fight against cancer is different from every other president’s war on cancer. I also asked her about the status of the country’s vacant position of chief technology officer — a single person, ideally somewhat geeky, whose entire job revolves around the technology issues driving the 21st century.
Steven Levy: Why did you sign up for this job?
Aarti Prabhakar: Because President Biden asked. He sees science and technology as the opportunity to achieve great things, and that’s exactly how I think about their purpose.
What big things?
OSTP’s mission is to advance the entire science and technology ecosystem. We have a system that follows a series of priorities. We spend a huge amount on research and development in the healthcare sector. But both public and corporate funding focus largely on drugs and medical devices and very little on prevention or clinical care practices—the things that could transform health, as opposed to managing disease. We too must address the climate crisis. When it comes to technologies like clean energy, we are failing to take results from research and translate them into impact for Americans. It is the unfinished business of this country.