The U.S. leads in artificial intelligence, but for how long?

Even as the world's top artificial-intelligence researchers gathered in Los Angeles this week, many are beginning to wonder just how much longer the U.S. will remain the epicenter of AI. The Neural Information Processing System (NIPS) conference in Long Beach is the number one place for presenting breakthroughs in AI. But U.S. government policies threaten to put a dampener on the recent boom in the field. The U.S. Congress's tax plan is the latest challenge, threatening to raise costs for graduate students significantly. This follows reduced funding for fields including AI and tightening of rules on immigration for international researchers.