US President Donald Trump presented the heads of the largest American tech giants with national medals for achievements in the field of science and technology. The awards included Google co-founder Sergey Brin, Nvidia founder Jensen Huang, Dell founder Michael Dell, SpaceX founder Elon Musk, and AMD CEO Lisa Su and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.
Image source: CNBC-TV18
The ceremony took place in Washington at the US Institute of Peace. “We live in an era of American technological wonders, and with the help of the men and women here today, we will always be on top.” – Donald Trump said at the event. The distribution of awards was as follows: the US National Medal of Science was awarded to Musk, Brin, Huang and Su, and the US President presented the National Medal of Technology and Innovation to Nadella and Della. Michael Kratsios, who heads the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, also spoke at the ceremony.
“You will go down in the annals of history as magnificent people,” — the American president assured the awardees. According to White House spokeswoman Liz Huston, the administration is grateful “to these incredible leaders in science and technology”and the recipients of the awards “Helping America’s Leadership in Innovation”.
Image source: The Hill
At the same time, it cannot be said that the actions of the American administration in relation to the companies whose leaders and founders were awarded by Donald Trump were exclusively benevolent. Yesterday, US authorities announced the suspension of issuing residence permits to employees of Microsoft Corporation and some other companies who come to work in the US from other countries. It even prompted some of the guests at the awards ceremony to emphasize the importance of immigration to America’s scientific potential.
At least Nvidia founder Jensen Huang (pictured below left) reminded the audience NBC Newsthat his parents brought him and his brother to the United States from Taiwan as children, following the “American dream.” The parents of the founder of Nvidia were present at the ceremony. Similarly, Lisa Su’s parents emigrated to the United States from Taiwan, and Sergei Brin’s parents moved from the USSR to the United States when he was 6 years old. Elon Musk received US citizenship as an adult, as did Satya Nadella. Only Michael Dell among the recipients is American-born.
Image source: The Hill
During his acceptance speech, Trump said that the United States was now living in a “golden age” and that the audience gathered at the event had an “extremely high IQ,” causing approving laughter in the audience.
Michael Kratsios promised scientists to make it easier to allocate funds for development and research, since existing mechanisms for funding science do not always provide the best results. Companies in the technology sector have stepped up to support government initiatives in return. Thus, they will allocate “computing credits” and scientific instruments totaling $2.4 billion, which the White House will be able to provide to those scientists whose work it considers the most promising and priority. Nuclear energy, quantum algorithms and AI-controlled physics laboratories will be among these areas. Among other things, NASA representatives spoke about the prospects for using nuclear energy sources in space exploration.
Representatives from OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Amazon (AWS) and Micron Technology spoke at the event about their participation in new government partnership programs. Representatives of academic institutions also took part in the conference, talking about their own research. Nobel Prize winner in physics Professor John Martinis expressed confidence that the golden age of science has already arrived, and emphasized that he is very fascinated by everything that is happening in the field of superintelligence.
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