Full Committee: "Future of AI Technology, Human Discovery, and American Global Competitiveness"
2025-04-09
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Source: Congress.gov
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Transcript
Good morning, everybody. The committee will come to order. Welcome everybody of the committee back. We appreciate everybody being back this morning for what I think is going to be an absolutely exciting hearing. And I will recognize myself for five minutes for an opening statement. And I want to thank our witnesses for being here and traveling long distance to be here. This kind of came from a Library of Congress, this hearing from a presentation that Dr. Smith put on his book Genesis that he wrote with Henry Kissinger, Henry Kissinger's last book. And I walked away thinking we needed to have the entire Congress hear your presentation. And so we're doing it with the entire Energy and Commerce Committee because I think an author always wants to know When they write a book, will somebody read my book? And then if they read the book, then will it have an impact? Well, today, you and all the witnesses are before the full Energy and Commerce Committee. And our dear colleague and the dear husband of our colleague, Debbie Dingell, used to say that if it's moving its energy, if it stops its commerce, something to that effect. So we have a lot of jurisdiction. I say it takes energy to move commerce. I can't improve on Chairman Dingell, but that's my version of it. We're having a full hearing. We typically do this in subcommittee, but this touches all jurisdictions, and I think everybody needs to hear it. If you think about, it's gonna take enormous energy to beat China to AI. In doing that, we have to protect the environment. Our telecom and privacy through our commerce and telecom committees will be dealing with this, and AI has particularly healthcare applications. So it touches all of our jurisdiction, and Dr. Schmidt, when I walked away from the Library of Congress, And I read your book. It gave me a sense of mission and the mission that a direction I want to take this committee in the time that I'm chairman. And to sum up what you said, it's the U.S. versus China. And who will win the war for AI? And it essentially I walked away.
This is as important as the dollar being the reserve currency in the world. It's that important. That's what's before us. And what I hear from people in this space is that we have the brainpower and we have the capital. What we need is the energy and the correct regulatory framework. And we have an example of what not to do. And I believe you said in your presentation Europe has chosen not to grow. So we can't look there as an example. We have to work through it ourselves. And Europe is a regulatory framework. Their energy framework, their regulatory framework, some of their regulatory framework written specifically to disadvantage American companies has made them noncompetitive. And Europe and the US had a similar size economy in 2008, and I've read that our economy is about 80% larger. So what do we need to do? And the reason we want to do a full committee is that we have to have broad consensus on how we work together. It has to be Democrat and Republican. People who tell me they invest, it's tough to invest based on congressional cycles or presidential cycles, that the rules are gonna change every two to four years. And so what I would like to hopefully we could do in this committee is come up with a regulatory framework and an energy policy that we can all, or most of us can agree on, at least build a broad consensus on how we develop massive amounts of energy while protecting our environment. And Dr. Schmidt, you said all energy resources are needed and then AI will develop solutions to deal with climate change. And so Microsoft, to put this in perspective, Microsoft data center can use as much power as the city of Seattle. is what I've been told. And so in the regulation side of it, we have to protect our privacy. Yesterday we had a hearing, our bills yesterday, on children's privacy and children's safety.
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