Extra: The Massive Transformative Potential of AI — The Fox News Rundown

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This is the Fox News Rundown Extra. I'm Chris Foster. The Stargate Project is a new company building physical and virtual infrastructure for artificial intelligence. It's a partnership of the artificial intelligence research and development company OpenAI, the computer technology company Oracle, and Japanese conglomerate SoftBank. President Trump, making the announcement this week, is pledging his administration's full support. We have Jamie Metzel on to talk about Stargate and the latest developments and advances in artificial intelligence. He served on the National Security Council during the Clinton administration and is the author of several books, the most recent, Superconvergence: How the Genetics, Biotech, and AI Revolutions Will Transform Our Lives, Work, and World. Not all of our conversation was included in the regular weekday rundown, and as we do twice every weekend, the whole thing is made available here. Glad you joined us. Hope you keep coming back. Now, Jamie Metzl on the Fox News Rundown Extra. Jamie, how's this Stargate partnership going to work? Is it just— is it three heads are better than one, or is it— what's the purpose of it?

Yeah, it seems to me that it's announcing something that was already happening, a major investment by OpenAI and its partners to expand its AI facility in Texas. And I think it's great, but this is not a transformative investment for the United States. It's an important step. In a positive direction. And it was great that President Trump gave this existing project a boost by announcing it yesterday.

Yeah, and at least put a spotlight on it. And he's talked, during the campaign, he talked about his interest in this technology and using it to better American interests. And, you know, maybe humanity is a byproduct. Now, is there any danger or disadvantage the more you decentralize AI infrastructure, or will Stargate just accelerate the technology?

So I don't think Stargate itself is transformative, but the entire universe of what's happening in the field of AI is massively transformative for America and humanity. And certainly America right now is the leader in AI technology, not just OpenAI, but there's a whole raft of companies, and whether they're existing established companies like Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and others. But then there are hundreds of really exciting startups that are, that are working in this space. So the best thing that we can do is to foster this ecosystem of innovation and growth. And it's great that President Trump seems committed to doing that. But nobody knows better than Elon Musk about the dangers that AI poses if we just say, all right, let's just forget regulation, forget governance. This is all, you know, how fast, how strong can we push down the pedal to the metal? As you know, Musk was the one, he's been known as an AI doomer. He's called AI our biggest existential threat. And that doesn't mean that AI is going to wipe us out. But it means that going forward in the best possible way for our own interests, we need to balance putting our foot on the gas and building the appropriate safeguards so that this very exciting and positive, in my view, dream doesn't become a nightmare.

Yeah. President Trump overturned an order that President Biden signed in 2023 meant to set up AI safety, advanced safety standards, and he referred to it as guardrails. Were there people in the field who found those standards too restrictive, or what's the point of overturning them other than just overturn them?

Well, there were some people who found them too restrictive. The 2024 Republican platform said that this executive order hindered AI innovation and called for less regulation. And again, I personally, I thought that was a really well-written, thoughtful executive order. It represented a huge amount of work and consultation with companies, with computer scientists, with regulators. And so if you just get rid, not necessarily of just this one executive order, but all of the standards and principles and guidelines that are already in place without replacing them, and none of these things are perfect, and maybe they can be replaced with something that's better. But if we just say that the idea of governance is getting in the way with the development of AI, the chaos that is going to result, uh, will ultimately overwhelm many of the benefits that I think are, are coming with this AI revolution.

Is it— maybe it's somewhat, you know, like the internet itself, where in the beginning it really was a lot more wild, wild west, and now it's a little less wild, wild west?

That's the case. I mean, certainly it's not just AI, but we are in the midst of a technological theories of overlapping technological revolutions. My new book that just came out is called Superconvergence. And this is what the book is about. It's not just one revolution, it's multiple revolutions. And so by definition, the governance and regulatory infrastructures can't keep up with the pace of technological innovation. But at least what we should be doing is saying that while we need to do everything possible to foster the healthy innovation and making America as competitive as we can possibly be and advancing the science and the technology and the applications, we need to do so in a way that incorporates the public good, however we see that. And so it is just not the case that we can have a technology that's this powerful and say, well, let's just see how it goes because we're already seeing these industrial-level scams. We're already seeing so many different areas where AI run amok can do incredible harm. And we're seeing incredible, incredible examples in healthcare, in agriculture, in industrial materials, so many different areas where AI is presenting some really remarkable, almost magical opportunity. So this is a, it's a balancing game and we need to do both. We need to really do everything possible to foster the kind of beneficial innovation to make sure that America continues to be the world leader, not just in AI, but in, in all of these technologies. But we need to do so recognizing that there are always tradeoffs and balances, and there's a role for government. There's a role for governance. There's a role for regulation. Luckily, in the United States, we have 50 different states that can do experimentation. We can try to figure out what works. But what we should not do is just to say, hey, we want a Wild West, because if we do that, a lot of people are going to get hurt.

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Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, um, says he thinks that you're going to see cancer after cancer cured once this thing gets going. You're going to see heart disease cured. He says not that it's not just gonna help with healthcare, it's going to, there are going to be diseases eradicated because of it. Maybe you can talk a little bit about how that's conceptualized and where are we with medical advances since we talked last summer? Are there, is it just, is it moving really, really fast?

Oh, it's incredibly exciting what's happening in healthcare. AI is not just transforming radiology, how we understand the different images and MRIs, but how we can predict and prevent diseases. And there are all kinds of new cures. Yesterday, there was a conversation about mRNA cancer vaccines. I know that there are a lot of people who are just against mRNA vaccines, but really exciting. You can actually, already this is happening where you could be in the middle of a brain surgery and you have a tumor and the surgeons are trying to figure out, is this a tumor that we need to take out? And there's a lot of risk of taking out a tumor in a living person, or can we leave it? And so you can extract a few cells from the tumor and sequence them and analyze them while the surgery is still going on to help inform the decision. Do we take out the tumor or do we leave it in? Personally, I mean, this is a very personal question for me, not just because I'm deeply involved in the future of healthcare world and write about this, but my own father was diagnosed with neuroendocrine cancer 2.5 years ago, and I really pushed for early on sequencing the genome of his cancer cells, and we found a targetable mutation from sequencing, and we were able to target that. And he had, against all predictions, he had incredible remission, and, and because of that has been able to experience, um, two Kansas City Chiefs Super Bowl victories. And we're, we're planning on the third.

Well, good luck. Um, all this stuff still— I know it's happening in real life, and you just told me it happened, it's happening in real life to your dad, but it, it still seems like pie in the sky to me in terms of it being really just, this is how the treatment is done. This is just the common treatment for cancers. When are people going to have access to this technology on a larger scale?

So it's hard because when people think about AI, most people think about ChatGPT, like I'm going to go and I'm going to go to the AI place and do AI. But we don't think of electricity that way. We think of electricity as something that just woven into our lives. And so right now, an increasing number of people who have cancer diagnoses, for example, have, like my father, the genomes of their cancer cells sequenced. The number's not high enough, but it's going up. So already, people with cancer diagnoses are starting to see this. In radiology, I mean, if you go to the hospital and you, for example, have your breast cancer scan, you're not asking the radiologist, what technology did you use when evaluating the scan? You just get the report back. And so it's not going to be necessarily that people think, oh, AI just did this, did X or Y. But it may well be that they get a diagnosis for breast cancer or something else, and AI played a role in that. We're starting to see, actually, there are about 5,000 clinical trials for gene therapies in the United States where, for most of them, it's where you have somebody has some kind of issue and you take cells out of their body, stem cells, You isolate the stem cells and engineer the stem cells using all of these overlapping technologies and AI and machine learning among them. And then you have these cells that you've engineered to fix whatever problem you're trying to fix. And then you put those cells back into the person's body and let them proliferate. So already, the FDA has approved the first gene therapy treatments for— I'm sorry, sickle cell disease and beta thalassemia. And there are 5,000 clinical trials. So it's not something that's going to happen overnight, and it's not something that should happen willy-nilly. It comes back to the point that I made earlier. This is really serious stuff. You don't need to have great governance when the question is, you know, asking OpenAI to plan your trip to Disney World. But if AI systems are playing a role in our healthcare and our diagnoses for cancer and our treatments, in all sorts of things. We need just to make sure that we're doing it wisely and well. So President Trump, like President Biden, is right to say America must lead and we need to massively invest across the board in ensuring American leadership. And if President Trump, which is his prerogative, is going to say we're going to rescind these various executive orders, I certainly hope that President Trump and his team will announce their plan of replacing these executive orders with some other strategy for making sure that we can best balance our essential technological innovation and our need to make sure that the American people are protected.

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Jimmy, weaving AI into the fabric of society is going to take a lot a lot of computing power, which takes a lot of electricity and a lot— explain the data centers to me and just how the power and the space and the infrastructure, how much this is going to take.

Well, certainly these AI systems, these large language model, LLMs, are taking huge amounts of energy. And that's why different tech companies like Microsoft are doing deals with nuclear power plants like the infamous Three Mile Island. So if we just continue as we have been, we're going to have to build an entire planet covered with data centers. So we're not going to do that. And so we need to think of ways, one, of getting the energy we need. And that's why some people are thinking, as I just mentioned, about nuclear power. We also need to think about more efficient means of using AI. We're talking about America, but in December last month, a Chinese company, Deepseek, announced their new AI algorithm called V3. And V3 was trained not with the highest-end NVIDIA chips, which are which America is blocking to China, but with lower-level NVIDIA chips and at a much, much lower price point, it achieved effectiveness rates similar to some of the better OpenAI and Google models with much less energy use. So we're going to have to innovate around the energy use problem. It could be at the level of developing energy sources like nuclear, but I think more likely it will be developing more efficient algorithms so that we can do the things that we need without requiring so much computing power.

There's an AI military startup, there's a bunch of them, but there's one in California called Anduril, or planning a factory in Ohio, for example. There are others. What are some of the newer military applications for AI beyond, you know, drones and robot dogs and the stuff I already know about?

Yeah, well, it's huge. I mean, anybody watching what's happening in Ukraine recognizes that AI is at the center of the future of warfare. China has recognized this. China has a massive program to invest, investing in and developing AI systems for military. And so again, if I were to ask you, how does electricity influence the military? You can't answer the question because we have a military defined at every level by its use of electricity. And so you're absolutely right about the incredible speed of evolution of AI in certainly in the aerial drones. Now there's a massive investment in the underwater drones. In surveillance because we have all these satellites up there taking millions, more than millions, often billions of images, but it's just impossible for humans to analyze that in real time. So AI is just going to be woven into everything. I mean, our military is one of the largest employers in the world, if not the, and so just in human resource management, in accounting, In the thing, how do we make the cement to build buildings? AI, like electricity, got woven into every aspect of just every military. AI is going to be woven into every aspect, including with new kinds of tools and new kinds of approaches. And we are certainly going to see greater autonomy in our killing systems because Right now, the only thing that's preventing full autonomy in killer drones in Ukraine is just that they aren't yet quite as effective as drones where there's some human role, because humans can still do many things actually that our AI systems can't do. But that won't always be the case. I mean, if you're the defense minister in Ukraine and you have to decide between making your killer robots fully autonomous or losing your country and having your kids kidnapped and your women raped, you're going to go with the autonomous killer drones. So we're in the middle of an arms race that's not just a military arms race, it's a societal arms race. And that's why they're correctly is pressure to make sure that the United States wins. But at the same time, as with every arms race, and especially given the significance of these technologies, if we just focus on letting these technologies go wild, it's going to ultimately harm us.

I might want one. I don't need a killer drone.

Yeah.

There are lots of times that military applications trickle down to the rest of us throughout history, because that's where the money is to spend and develop this stuff. And so this could be another way that this technology—

Oh, it will. I mean, that's where the internet comes from. That's where the computer comes largely, comes from jet travel. So many things. Have a very, very significant military part. Part of it is because of funding, and part of it is just because conflicts create intense pressure, and there's so much pressure to innovate and to counter the other person's innovation. So for sure, we're going to see technology going from military to civilian, but even more, we are going to see civilian technologies having massive military applications. And so we're really, what we're just seeing across the board, and it's, it's top-down and bottom-up. Certainly in China, there's a lot of pressure with industrial policy from the government to push this sector. China has a goal of being the world's leading AI power by 2030. The US In the beginning, everything was top-down. I mean, people forget that the foundation of our entire tech sector was the government and has consistently been the government. And then we had our mythology, which was not correct, but it was a mythology that everything is a bunch of people working in their garages. And certainly there were many people in the Republican Party who thought that the government should get out of the innovation business. And now with this announcement yesterday of Stargate, insofar as there was a US government role, and I'm not sure whether there was a US government role or whether this was just an opportunistic way of capitalizing on something that was already happening, which seems to be the case. But certainly America is getting back to the kinds of industrial policies that drove a lot of what we did in the, in the 1940s and '50s. So there are different ways of modes of societal organization that are in many ways competing with each other.

Jamie, I might tell a lot of others this, but I don't always mean it. Your book Superconvergence was very interesting. So if anybody's interested in what we've just talked about, you can go check that out. Jamie Metzl, author of Super Convergence, served on the National Security Council under the Clinton administration, among all the other stuff he does. Jamie, good to talk to you again. Thanks.

My pleasure.

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