NDAA passes — soon to become law, NeurIPS wraps up its annual conference, and DeepMind’s new efficient language model

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Worth Knowing

NeurIPS 2021 Showcases AI and ML Research: The 35th edition of NeurIPS concluded last week, offering an overview of the state of AI and ML research and which companies, universities and countries are leading the way. Of the 2,344 accepted papers, U.S. researchers led the pack with 1,431, well ahead of China’s 411 and the UK’s 268. Among private industry-affiliated papers, Alphabet subsidiaries took first (Google, 177 accepted papers) and third place (Deepmind, 81), with Microsoft in second (116 accepted papers). University-affiliated papers, meanwhile, saw U.S. institutions take four of the top five spots — China’s Tsinghua University rounded out a top five led by MIT, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, and UC Berkeley. Six papers took home Outstanding Paper Awards, while two were recognized with the new Datasets and Benchmarks Best Paper Awards. NeurIPS also gives out a Test of Time Award, which recognizes older papers that have a continuing impact on the field. This year’s recipient was Online Learning for Latent Dirichlet Allocation, published in 2010.
Level 3 Self-Driving and DeepMind’s (Relatively) Small Language Model: NeurIPS wasn’t the only place to find news about notable AI developments:
Government Updates

Senate Passes NDAA, On to Biden for Signature: Last week, the Senate voted 88-11 to approve the FY2022 National Defense Authorization Act. The $768 billion bill (summary available here) contains a number of provisions related to AI and emerging technology, including:
  • Sec. 217 requires the DOD to establish a national network for microelectronics R&D. The FY2021 NDAA had authorized such a network as part of the CHIPS for America Act; the new bill mandates it.
  • Sec. 226 requires the DOD to “review the potential applications of artificial intelligence and digital technology to the platforms, processes, and operations” of the military and to establish performance metrics for AI adoption efforts.
  • Sec. 228 requires the DOD to establish “executive education activities on emerging technologies” for select officers and civilian staff.
  • Sec. 232 authorizes the Pentagon to carry out a pilot program that would establish data repositories containing DOD data. Those repositories would then be accessible to certain private and public organizations to aid in AI and ML development for the DOD.
  • Sec. 247 requires the DOD to provide regular reports and briefings to Congress on its implementation of recommendations made by the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence in its final report.
  • Sec. 851 modifies a section of the FY2021 NDAA that had prohibited the acquisition of printed circuit boards from North Korea, China, Russia or Iran. The prohibition had been set to take effect in 2023, but this provision delays it until January 1, 2027.
  • Sec. 1251 directs the DOD to conduct a comparative analysis of U.S. and Chinese modernization efforts across five critical technologies: directed energy, hypersonics, biotechnologies, quantum science and cyberspace capabilities.
The bill heads next to President Biden, who is expected to sign it into law soon.

Biden Administration Ramps Up Crackdown on Chinese Companies: Over the past month, the Commerce Department has added dozens of Chinese companies to its Entity List — restricting their access to U.S. exports without government approval — while the Treasury Department blacklisted several more for their involvement in the oppression of China’s Uyghur population — barring U.S. citizens and firms from investing in those companies. Among the firms added to the Treasury blacklist are the drone company DJI Technology Co., four companies involved in developing facial recognition technology, and the AI giant SenseTime. SenseTime’s addition caused the firm to temporarily postpone its $770 million Hong Kong IPO, but the company chose earlier this week to relaunch it. According to The Financial Times, the IPO’s resurrection was made possible by hundreds of millions dollars of financial backing from Chinese state-backed investors, which will help SenseTime replace the investors it stands to lose post-blacklisting.

Job Openings and New Funding

CSET closes out the year with the happy news of a $250,000 grant from the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation to support the CyberAI project, particularly to highlight current barriers to cybersecurity and AI education at the high school level. 

And we have more exciting news — we’re hiring! Please apply or share the role below with candidates in your network:

  • AI Research Subgrant (AIRS) Program Director: CSET’s AIRS program will promote the exploration of foundational technical topics that relate to the potential national security implications of AI over the long term via research subgrants. The Director of AIRS will manage all technical, programmatic, and financial aspects of the new AIRS program.
Additional new positions coming in January 2022! Please bookmark our careers page to stay up to date on all active job postings.

What’s New at CSET

REPORTSPUBLICATIONS AND PODCASTSFORECASTS
Foretell has launched a new project that combines expert and crowd judgment. You can read more about the experts’ views, including how they think trends like China’s military aggression, political polarization, and the strength of the tech sector affect the DOD-Silicon Valley relationship. See all 20 forecast questions associated with this project here, and read more about the subject in Research Fellow Michael Page’s new issue brief, Wisdom of the Crowd as Arbiter of Expert Disagreement.

EVENT RECAPS
  • On December 16, CSET’s webinar Deconstructing China’s Vision for the Future of Warfare featured a conversation between CSET Research Analyst Ryan Fedasiuk and the inaugural director of the DOD’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, Lieutenant General (retired) Jack Shanahan, about Chinese military progress in AI and its implications for the United States.
IN THE NEWS
What We’re Reading

Paper: The Great Tech Rivalry: China vs the U.S., Graham Allison, Kevin Klyman, Karina Barbesino and Hugo Yen, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs (December 2021) 

Article: Filling gaps in trustworthy development of AI, by Shahar Avin et al., Science (December 2021) 

Article: Ethical and social risks of harm from Language Models by Laura Weidinger et al., arXiv (December 2021)

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Schedule Update

policy.ai will be off for the holidays, but don’t worry — we’ll be back on January 13 with all the latest in AI, emerging tech and security policy!