On Jan. 27, President Donald Trump said Chinese startup DeepSeek’s successful launch of its latest AI model “should be a wake-up call” for American industry. As the U.S. hustles to maintain its leadership in artificial intelligence, our long-term strategy needs to involve breaking down silos and working across sectors to provide the supporting cyber infrastructure, education and policies that can drive innovation.
Leadership at a national scale won’t be achieved by one company, whether it’s OpenAI or DeepSeek — it needs partnerships that can effectively bring together industry, academia and government. The most successful country (or state) will be the one that builds an innovation ecosystem spanning these sectors where AI can flourish, where the best minds can come together to advance AI and address important issues — for instance, improving medical diagnoses and treatments, more effectively predicting wildfires, or counteracting the downward trend of children’s reading skills.
In Utah, we’re working to catalyze such an ecosystem. On Jan. 28, about 70 people joined us at a Utah Tech Week event launching Utah’s Responsible AI Community Consortium. Representatives from academia, government and businesses large and small — from Nvidia and Amazon Web Services to local startups — discussed how we can all work together to advance AI in Utah.
At the University of Utah, this work started under the umbrella of the $100 million One-U Responsible AI Initiative, launched by university President Taylor Randall in October 2023. We’re responsibly accelerating impactful AI research at the University of Utah, but we recognize the need to work across the state to maximize our impact. We want to leverage other AI efforts, both public and private, and create a movement where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. We want a system where anyone across the state can learn about, contribute to and benefit from AI.
So last fall, we started four community-led responsible AI special interest groups: policy, infrastructure, frameworks and best practices, and workforce development and education. The work of those groups will funnel into a consortium to benefit all stakeholders. While the University of Utah is facilitating this effort, the consortium is a co-op led by its members. We encourage all interested Utahns to join us and make their voices heard in this formative stage.
One of our community consortium’s founding members is Zachary Boyd, director of Utah’s Office of AI Policy. At our Jan. 28 event, Boyd described the consortium as a way to synthesize Utah’s expertise and form partnerships as we work toward shared goals. “Everything we want to do — from building responsible AI norms to making sure that adoption of AI technology throughout all sectors goes as smoothly as possible — the basis of all of that is the networks of connection,” Boyd said.
One example of a cross-sector network with the potential to benefit all Utahns: public-private partnerships where businesses work with educational institutions to build training programs that develop students’ and workers’ AI skills. We’re already working toward such partnerships, and they’ll be critical to our success. As Kevin Williams — Ascend AI Labs founder and co-leader of our workforce development and education special interest group — so incisively said at our Jan. 28 event, “At the end of the day, all of the infrastructure, all of the policy, all of the frameworks end up at the pointy end of the spear, which is the people and the work.”
From providing computing power to developing an AI-ready workforce, it will take a village to make Utah a leader in AI. Our community consortium is that village. During Utah Tech Week, Bassam Salem — a founding member of the consortium, a member of the University of Utah Board of Trustees and the founder of Mindshare Ventures — pointed out Utah’s advantage lies in its culture.
“This is not normal,” Salem told the crowd on Jan. 28. “It’s not normal for a university to invest $100 million in support of a societally impactful initiative so quickly and to make it so open, transparent and for the benefit of the entire community. It’s not normal for a state government to be so accessible, so involved and so engaged with industry. And what I really love about Utah and the Utah tech scene is it’s not normal that we’re so collaborative, so cooperative and so constructive as an industry, all helping one another.”
Salt Lake City will once again host the Winter Olympics in 2034, Salem reminded us. “Wouldn’t it be great if in the next nine years we can make this materialize?” he asked. “We can make Utah a hub of responsible AI.”