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MODERATOR: And now I'm pleased to introduce the Secretary of State of the United States of America, Antony Blinken. (Applause.)
SECRETARY BLINKEN: Hey, thank you. Good afternoon. Thank you, everyone.
And, first of all, to those of you who are just starting like I am on High-Level Week here at the United Nations in New York - take it from a veteran and also a native New Yorker - three simple words of advice: take the subway. (Laughter.)
Last year, we gathered on the margins on the General Assembly to discuss the future promise of artificial intelligence to advance sustainable development. And of the many events I did last year, this is one of the events that really stuck with me, because I could feel the energy, the palpable enthusiasm, the belief that AI can be a - such a force multiplier in actually moving forward on Sustainable Development Goals.
This year, that future promise is increasingly a present-day possibility. But if we're going to realize the full potential of AI to improve the lives of people around the world, that requires accelerating our efforts to ensure that this technology is genuinely inclusive. And that's what I want to spend a little bit of time talking about today.
"Inclusive" means that more people can access, understand, and develop AI to help solve the problems that they actually face in their lives. It means that AI technology benefits from - and helps preserve - cultural and linguistic diversity. It means that civil society, the private sector, governments, multilateral organizations all have a voice in shaping the governance and applications of this technology. It means that AI reduces, rather than exacerbates, the enduring inequities within and between our countries.
Around the world, we are seeing remarkable innovations in harnessing AI to actually expand opportunity.
Just to cite a few examples, in Brazil, AI chatbots are providing personalized tutoring to students with disabilities, expanding access to quality education for them.
In Indonesia, AI is helping manage and optimize renewable energy grids - bringing clean, affordable energy to more communities.
In India, farmers are using AI-driven apps to adapt to changing climate conditions, improving livelihoods, feeding more people.
The focus of this gathering - what brings us all together today - is what can we do to give more people in more places the power to unleash opportunities like these.
We know that we have our work cut out for us. Because, as we know, this revolution, this AI revolution, is leaving people behind - simply due to a lack of access or a lack of capacity. And those are really the challenges before us and the challenges that we're focused on today.
Now, this is a disparity that hurts all of us, and here's why: the more inclusive AI is, the more effective it can actually be in tackling the challenges that are affecting people everywhere, including here in the United States, including in many other countries around the world: challenges like rising temperatures, deadly viruses, things that don't stop at borders and demand that we find partners and solutions in every part of the globe; challenges like food insecurity that can lead to conflict and mass migrations. Making this technology more inclusive, it's not an act of generosity. It's in our national interest and in the interests of our firms, of our entrepreneurs, of our investors.
The foundation for making AI more inclusive is governance - the international rules, the international norms that help promote safe, secure, and trustworthy AI systems.
Now, just over the past year, the United States and our partners have made remarkable progress in building AI frameworks that promote innovation and more equitable access, while at the same time protecting human rights and safety, working with a wide range of partners in every region.
Our administration worked with leading AI companies on a set of voluntary commitments, like carrying out security tests before they release new products, developing tools to help users recognize AI-generated content.
The U.S. teamed up with our G7 partners to set out guiding principles and a code of conduct to address the impact of advanced AI systems on our societies and on our communities, and we carried this work forward at summits in the United Kingdom and then in Korea.
We put these principles at the heart of a UN General Assembly Resolution on AI that the United States developed. In March, every UN member adopted it by consensus.
And in November, the United States will host an international gathering of AI safety institutes and experts to deepen the technical foundations for implementing these governance frameworks.
In the conversations that I've had the opportunity to have around the world with government colleagues, with entrepreneurs, with advocates, with students, what I've heard is, again, this tremendous sense of optimism about the promise of AI to help tackle the problems that they're facing, to actually improve lives in tangible ways.
And at least from my own experience, I'd say that optimism, that enthusiasm, is even more widely shared in the so-called global majority countries. So today, one of the things our government is doing is putting out new resources to help our partners advance the effort to use AI in ways that actually improve lives: a playbook that identifies key actions that the United States and our development partners can take to harness AI to advance sustainable development; an agenda that sets out the principles, the priorities, the practices of advancing AI research with our international partners.
These resources add to the risk management tool that we shared in back in July, which will help organizations develop and use AI in a way that respects human rights.
Today, we're also announcing a groundbreaking new public-private partnership with leading AI companies to help expand access and capacity in the places and communities where it's needed most, especially in developing countries.
The State Department will partner with Amazon, with Anthropic, with Google, with IBM, with Meta, with Microsoft, with Nvidia, with OpenAI to expand access to AI. The Partnership for Global Inclusivity on AI will work to close the gap in three crucial areas: compute, capacity, and context, the three Cs of advancing of equity through artificial intelligence.
First on compute, we're going to expand access to cutting-edge AI models, compute credits, and more open-source tools. This means that developers, researchers, innovators in low-and-middle-income countries will be able to use models and tools that can improve their own AI applications, and better tailor them to local needs and local challenges.
Second, capacity. We will accelerate training efforts to empower people to use and adapt AI tools. Here again, just about everywhere I go, the desire to have a transfer of knowledge to enable countries to genuinely build capacity is one of the things I hear the most. I think this focus on capacity-building will really answer needs that we hear around the world.
Finally, context. We'll work with governments, with businesses, with civil society organizations, with communities to create localized, context-specific datasets, including for indigenous cultures and languages.
To catalyze this partnership, I'm also announcing today that the Department of State and USAID will spend $33 million in U.S. foreign assistance on AI development, with $10 million specifically focused on expanding access. We'll work with Congress to provide $23 million for programs to build on our efforts to develop safe, reliable, and trustworthy AI governance frameworks; use AI to advance human rights and development priorities; and promote educational and cultural exchanges on AI-related topics.
Together, we and our private sector partners are committing over $100 million to this effort.
Now, I'm eager to hand it over to those partners in just a minute. But before I do that, let me remind us of one more reason that this effort is so important. It increases our odds of creating world-changing applications.
AI's lightning evolution is, of course, being powered by rapid advances in data, in chips, in computing, in algorithms. But many of its greatest leaps are being driven not by machines, but by us - human beings, our needs, our hopes, our creativity, our ingenuity.
To get the most out of this transformative technology, we have to give more people in more places the chance to adapt it and to use it for good. None of us - no country, no community, no particular people, have a monopoly on good ideas, on innovation, on problem solving.
And one of the things that I've learned from being in this business for more than 32 years is that for virtually every problem the world faces, I'm convinced that somewhere someone has at least the beginnings of an answer. But we have to find ways to share it, and we have to find ways to empower more people to find it.
The more we unleash human creativity, human ingenuity in every part of this planet, the better off all of us are going to be. And you can just feel palpably how AI can be at the very heart of this endeavor.
So I'm so grateful to all of our partners in today's effort. For me, for the government, particularly working with the private sector, having these public-private partnerships, really is part of the secret sauce of success. And to each of you - thank you, thank you, thank you.
