Washington AI Network with Tammy Haddad
Mar 28, 2025 · 49 min · 14 segments
Host Tammy Haddad interviews Senator Mike Rounds, co-chair of the Senate AI Caucus, and Representative Zach Nunn in this special edition of the Washington AI Network podcast, recorded live at the…
Zach NunnGuest
Mike RoundsGuest
Tammy HaddadHost
We actually had testimony in DC last year in which one of the researchers said that they believed that we could do more research and get more results in a millisecond than a single lab could do in over 200 years of study.
That type of acceleration means that you have an opportunity to do yes and no answers on different drugs and protocols that you could use in treatment of cancers, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, perhaps diabetes as well.
And our goal would be, let's get as much research done using appropriate databases, good databases, so that in the end, in a shorter period of time, we can come up with answers to actually begin curing cancers, addressing the issues of diabetes, and delaying the onset of Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.
First of all, in Washington, D.C., unless you work together across the aisle, Republicans and Democrats, it's really difficult to get things done.
There's a group of us that came together to basically form a team to keep, on a bipartisan basis, the research into what makes AI work so that other Senate members could actually listen to it and learn from it and feel comfortable discussing it.
Chuck Schumer, Todd Young, Martin Heinrich, and myself put together a series of nine separate, basically, gatherings last year for members of the Senate in which we brought the brightest and sharpest AI developers and funders and so forth in, people from all walks of life, the labor unions, the healthcare organizations, the technologists, but people that were involved in AI, the large and the small.
And they're giving us a site of how we go to keep this all together in terms of the development of AI in the United States.
The question is, where will it be developed, here or elsewhere? Whose standards will help to develop the protocols for AI in the future? And then also, how do you make sure that the benefits of it come back to the American people? Which to me is the most important part of keeping confidence in the development of AI long-term.
We're gonna use it, we already use it in the defense of our country, but for most people, I think they're gonna see artificial intelligence actually benefiting them when it comes to healthcare.
We have databases right now made up of people that benefit from Medicare and from Medicaid, veterans, and then your normal hospitals that receive payment, and your doctor's offices that actually treat other individuals with private insurance carriers.
All of them, if we can put together anonymous databases, can be used to train AI models in the future.
The more and the more accurate these databases are, the better chances we have of accelerating the types of protocols, the types of therapeutics, and perhaps the types of vaccines that would work in the future for going after just cancer as an example.
There's so many conversations about the big companies and with open source, which is now pretty much accepted, there's more opportunities for smaller players.
When you're talking about an issue that big as health and health AI, Where do you think the answers will come? Is that at NIH? Is that private industry? And is there a way to collaborate on that? Because to your point, it's game-changing for everyone.
Every single person in the United States could have a better life with health AI.
And I think NIH is the National Institute of Health is where it should be coordinated from.
But that doesn't mean that private organizations shouldn't play an active role in it.
We actually had testimony in DC last year in which one of the researchers said that they believed that we could do more research and get more results in a millisecond than a single lab could do in over 200 years of study.
That type of acceleration means that you have an opportunity to do yes and no answers on different drugs and protocols that you could use in treatment of cancers, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, perhaps diabetes as well.
And our goal would be, let's get as much research done using appropriate databases, good databases, so that in the end, in a shorter period of time, we can come up with answers to actually begin curing cancers, addressing the issues of diabetes, and delaying the onset of Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.
First of all, in Washington, D.C., unless you work together across the aisle, Republicans and Democrats, it's really difficult to get things done.
There's a group of us that came together to basically form a team to keep, on a bipartisan basis, the research into what makes AI work so that other Senate members could actually listen to it and learn from it and feel comfortable discussing it.
Chuck Schumer, Todd Young, Martin Heinrich, and myself put together a series of nine separate, basically, gatherings last year for members of the Senate in which we brought the brightest and sharpest AI developers and funders and so forth in, people from all walks of life, the labor unions, the healthcare organizations, the technologists, but people that were involved in AI, the large and the small.
And they're giving us a site of how we go to keep this all together in terms of the development of AI in the United States.
The question is, where will it be developed, here or elsewhere? Whose standards will help to develop the protocols for AI in the future? And then also, how do you make sure that the benefits of it come back to the American people? Which to me is the most important part of keeping confidence in the development of AI long-term.
We're gonna use it, we already use it in the defense of our country, but for most people, I think they're gonna see artificial intelligence actually benefiting them when it comes to healthcare.
We have databases right now made up of people that benefit from Medicare and from Medicaid, veterans, and then your normal hospitals that receive payment, and your doctor's offices that actually treat other individuals with private insurance carriers.
All of them, if we can put together anonymous databases, can be used to train AI models in the future.
The more and the more accurate these databases are, the better chances we have of accelerating the types of protocols, the types of therapeutics, and perhaps the types of vaccines that would work in the future for going after just cancer as an example.
There's so many conversations about the big companies and with open source, which is now pretty much accepted, there's more opportunities for smaller players.
When you're talking about an issue that big as health and health AI, Where do you think the answers will come? Is that at NIH? Is that private industry? And is there a way to collaborate on that? Because to your point, it's game-changing for everyone.
Every single person in the United States could have a better life with health AI.
And I think NIH is the National Institute of Health is where it should be coordinated from.
But that doesn't mean that private organizations shouldn't play an active role in it.
The rest of this transcript — segmented and speaker-labeled, so you land on the exact moment something was said
Search every transcript — by keyword, by phrase, or by meaning, across every show Radar indexes
Trends — what is surging across podcasts, measured against its own baseline
Alerts — when a name you follow appears in a newly indexed episode
No account is needed to search Radar.