Levin calls for strategic AI investments at Hoover Institution event

Jan. 22, 2025, 11:20 p.m.

University President Jon Levin ’94 called the opportunities for machine learning “extraordinary” during a speech given at the Hoover Prosperity Program’s conference, “Challenges Facing the U.S. Economy,” on Tuesday.

Levin’s panel, titled “How Should the US Economy Adapt to the AI Boom?,” centered on the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on the U.S. economy. Steven Davis and Justin Grimmer, senior fellows at the Hoover Institution and experts in labor economics and political science, respectively, appeared on the panel with Levin.

Surging interest in artificial intelligence has made AI a focal point of discussions about the future of the U.S. economy, which coincided with the political spotlight on President Donald Trump’s inauguration. Much of the conversation focused on the impact of emerging technologies and the expectations for the new administration.

In her introductory remarks, former Secretary of State and Hoover Institution Director Condoleezza Rice referenced history as she voiced strong support for free-market-based economic models. 

“A century of social science research has shown that the market economy has improved living standards, expanded economic opportunities and increased social mobility more than any other system in history since our nation’s history,” said Rice, who was sharply critical of both socialism and populism. 

“AI is triggering an enormous investment boom,” Levin said, citing OpenAI’s Stargate Project, which will invest $500 billion in building AI infrastructure. Levin also noted a recent Goldman Sachs study that forecasted an estimated $1 trillion investment in AI over the coming years.

“I think there’s a very interesting set of  economic questions about who will control the technology, who will emerge as winners of the technology — we don’t have answers,” Levin said.

Levin highlighted three of those questions for the audience. The first, he called “traditional concerns about economic market power — that is, pricing and so forth.” His second question concerned political power. According to Levin, “it’s not really a surprise who was sitting behind the President at the rotunda yesterday,” referring to the presence of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, X, and SpaceX, at President Donald Trump’s inauguration. 

Finally, Levin questioned the “market power of people’s attention and information flow,” noting that more and more search queries in browsers are returning AI-generated answers as opposed to search links — making it harder for individuals to check their own sources.

“They’re just telling people, ‘here’s the answer to your question,’ and that to me raises a whole interesting set of questions about who will get to decide what kind of information is provided to people,” he said. 

For Levin, this concern does not immediately warrant government action.

“I don’t think that’s a call for regulation, actually. I think it’s a call for a lot of thought,” Levin said.

In response, Davis said he worries about “the scope for misguided regulation and lack of clarity around property rights and liability risks in the legal sphere can slow these breakthroughs but also stymie their commercial applications.”

Davis argued against overemphasizing the risks of AI. 

“It’s easy and academics are very good at envisioning potential bad paths that technologies might go down, including AI, and then imagining we have to undertake lots of preventative steps to head that off, but I’m not in favor of that approach,” he said. 

“I have close to zero confidence in my esteemed colleagues to predict exactly how AI will play out,” Davis said.

“The goal of our discussion is not to present silver bullet answers in the form of ‘all we have to do is…’ if it were that easy, then these would not be challenges,” said Stephen Haber, the director of the Hoover Prosperity Program. “Rather it is the goal of the conference to frame the challenges facing the United States as tractable questions.”

Launched this year, the Hoover Prosperity Program brings together scholars to discuss political and economic systems which improve living standards, economic opportunities and social mobility. 

When asked how academic institutions could possibly compete with corporations in the race to develop and “win” AI technology, Levin said he hoped that academic institutions like Stanford would continue to “attract great people” through a two pronged approach: academic freedom and interdisciplinary collaboration.

“I’m not worried about the University’s research capacity for great work because what universities do is just different from industry,” Levin said.



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