U.S. supremacy in A.I. may hinge on these proposed policies

Nearly a year ago, the Biden Administration debuted the National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource Task Force, intended to help the U.S. fully capitalize on progress in A.I. 

The group includes a mix of government officials like U.S. deputy chief technology officer Lynne Parker, academics such as Stanford University’s Fei-Fei Li, and industry experts like Andrew Moore, director of Google Cloud’s A.I. unit.

On Friday, the task force issued recommendations to lawmakers about how to ensure that U.S. businesses and universities have the necessary resources to excel in machine learning. Their recipe: Making sure everyone in the U.S. has access to enough data and computing power to compete against rivals like China.

The task force’s recommendations are intended to help “lower the barriers” for companies to adopt A.I. technologies while also ensuring that they do so in a way that protects people’s privacy and doesn’t weaken cybersecurity, according to a summary of the report that the task force shared with Fortune.

Daniela Braga, a task force member and CEO of the enterprise startup Defined.ai (formerly DefinedCrowd), hopes the recommendations lead to the government creating a kind of A.I. marketplace, in which companies and research groups can pay to access datasets and machine-learning tools.

“It’s really like a marketplace with all the data at the U.S. government scale,” Braga said. “You will have your data from healthcare, from energy, from climate.”

Ultimately, the project is supposed to even the A.I. playing field so that not only Big Tech—Google parent Alphabet, Amazon, and [hotlink]Apple, for example—have access to the mountains of data and major computing resources necessary to make A.I. bloom.

Braga, who once worked at Microsoft, acknowledged the contributions Big Tech has made to A.I., particularly regarding deep learning and neural networks, the software that can discover and act on patterns it finds in enormous quantities of data. Online ad companies like Alphabet and Meta, in particular, have been able to obtain enough data over the years to greatly enhance their A.I. capabilities.

Today, however, privacy laws have made it more difficult to amass as much data, which has helped to solidify Big Tech’s dominance, Braga explained. The A.I. marketplace project is also intended to help organizations more easily keep up with China’s A.I. industry, which is “the big competitor here,” Braga said.

Indeed, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has increasingly sounded alarms about the threat of Chinese companies like TikTok owner ByteDance to U.S. businesses. 

Braga acknowledged the irony of the A.I. task force pointing to both U.S. tech giants and the Chinese tech industry as creating potential barriers to smaller companies and research groups taking full advantage of A.I. As Fortune previously reported, the U.S. is considering regulating Big Tech, which some experts speculate could have the unintended consequence of slowing A.I.’s progress in the U.S. while letting China leap ahead.

“I still see both sides,” Braga said about Big Tech’s contributions to A.I. and the argument that the U.S. needs these tech behemoths to dominate A.I. because of rising competition from China.

“But man, they really eat our lunch today,” Braga said. “It’s really difficult to compete.”

As for how the marketplace would work, Braga said companies and academic institutions would be able add their data to the marketplace. Companies would have to pay to access the marketplace, and if they contribute data or tools, they could get discounts, which could entice participation. While it’s unclear which government agency would oversee the project, it needs a sustainable business model, she said.

“It cannot be just funded by the government,” Braga said.

Fortune would love to hear from Eye on A.I. readers about ways the U.S. government can spur A.I. innovation in the private sector. Send my colleague Jeremy Kahn your thoughts.

On a personal note, this is my final edition of the Eye on A.I. newsletter, which my extremely capable and amazing colleague Jeremy will be taking over. It’s been an incredible past two years writing about A.I. and business for all you awesome readers. You all let me know when I failed to understand some sort of complicated nuance about A.I. and cheered me on when I (finally) had something unique to say. Like a neural network, I learned from all of you and your input. I’ll share more about my next phase sometime soon. Keep on reading!

Jonathan Vanian 
@JonathanVanian
jonathan.vanian@fortune.com

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com