Mark Zuckerberg, Jensen Huang, Sergey Brin, Larry Ellison are the new members of Trump’s President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.
President Trump just announced the first members of the latest iteration of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST). But instead of the usual lineup of academics and researchers, he basically assembled a Silicon Valley oligarchy.
The initial roster features Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Nvidia chief Jensen Huang alongside Oracle founder Larry Ellison and Google co-founder Sergey Brin. Throw in AMD CEO Lisa Su and Dell chief Michael Dell, and the amount of influence sitting in one room becomes absolutely staggering. Tech investors David Sacks and Michael Kratsios will be co-chairing the whole thing.
It’s hard to wrap your head around the level of power members of this council hold. If you combine their personal wealth with the market caps of the companies they run, the total is bigger than the gross domestic product of most countries on Earth. These are among the most influential people in the world, who own the entire tech industry.
The official goal of this panel is to shape AI policy and help the country outpace tech advancements coming out of China. Trump already banned imports of all routers from foreign countries, labelling the hardware a high national security risk.
It will be particularly interesting to see what AI policies this group will come up with. The official goal is “ensuring all Americans thrive in the Golden Age of Innovation,” which sounds sweet, but doesn’t really mean anything. If we take into account that every single CEO from this list is investing heavily in AI, with some even staking the entire future of their companies on the success of this technology, we’ll see who the AI policies will actually help thrive.
The council technically doesn’t have the legal power to actually write laws or pass regulations itself; the board is strictly advisory in nature. However, they have direct ear of the president and the entire executive branch, so you draw the conclusion.
Source: The White House
