Legislators met with dozens of techies and business leaders May 10 for the White House's Artificial Intelligence for American Industry summit. They're keeping the conversation around research and development and adoption of AI alive and well, as the U.S. strives to stay on top of global innovation. The Office of Science and Technology Policy and Michael Kratsios, the president's technical adviser, welcomed executives from more than 30 major tech companies like Amazon, Facebook and Google for the summit. It convened more than 100 senior government officials, technical experts from academia, heads of industrial research labs and business leaders, according to the White House's summary report. OSTP also announced a Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence under the National Science and Technology Council to advise the administration on interagency AI R&D priorities going forward.

Artificial intelligence is perhaps the biggest buzzword in federal technology today. For the government--and society at large--to truly benefit from AI's potential, government, industry and academia will have to come together to foster this nascent technology, according to the president's top tech adviser. The White House convened a summit Thursday of top thinkers in the field of AI, during which Michael Kratsios, deputy assistant to the president for technology policy and current head of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, announced a new Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence made of up the leading AI researchers in government. "In the summer of 1956, a dozen American scientists gathered on Dartmouth's campus with the goal to, 'find how to make machines solve the kinds of problems now reserved for humans,'" Kratsios said, according to prepared remarks provided to Nextgov by OSTP. "Now, nearly 62 years later, the age of artificial intelligence is here, and with it the hope of better lives for the American people."