The Biden administration has made significant moves in the AI space, announcing sweeping new restrictions on exporting AI chips and issuing an executive order to open up federal land to AI data centers. However, the question on everyone's mind is whether these moves will have a lasting impact, or if the incoming Trump administration will roll back these enactments.

The export restrictions, which are scheduled to take effect after a 120-day comment period, have been met with criticism from tech giants like Nvidia, whose business would be seriously affected by the restrictions. The Trump administration will have broad leeway over how the measures are implemented, and whether to change them in any way. Former PayPal COO David Sacks, Trump's AI and crypto "czar," has already committed to revoking another AI-related Biden executive order that set standards for AI safety and security.

However, there are reasons to believe that the incoming administration may not rock the boat too much. Trump has promised expedited permits for companies that invest at least $1 billion in the U.S., and has picked Lee Zeldin, who has vowed to cut regulations he sees as burdensome to businesses, to lead the EPA. Aspects of Biden's export rules could stand, particularly those targeting China, which Trump has identified as the U.S.' biggest rival in AI.

One piece in question is Israel's inclusion in the list of countries subjected to AI hardware trade caps. Trump has described himself as a "protector" of Israel and has signaled that he's likely to be more permissive toward Israel's military actions in the region. It remains to be seen how the Trump administration will approach these issues, but one thing is certain - we'll have a clearer picture within the week.

In other AI news, OpenAI has announced that paying users of ChatGPT can now ask the AI assistant to schedule reminders or recurring requests through a new beta feature called Tasks. This feature will start rolling out to ChatGPT Plus, Team, and Pro users around the globe this week.

Meanwhile, executives and researchers leading Meta's AI efforts have been revealed to have obsessed over beating OpenAI's GPT-4 model while developing Meta's own Llama 3 family of models. This was revealed through messages unsealed by a court on Tuesday.

OpenAI has also appointed Adebayo "Bayo" Ogunlesi, an executive at investment firm BlackRock, to its board of directors. The company's current board bears little resemblance to OpenAI's board in late 2023, the members of which fired CEO Sam Altman only to reinstate him days later.

In startup news, Blaize is set to become the first AI chip startup to go public in 2025. Founded by former Intel engineers in 2011, the company has raised $335 million from investors, including Samsung, for its chips for cameras, drones, and other edge devices.

A recent study co-authored by Dan Hendrycks, an adviser to billionaire Elon Musk's AI company, xAI, suggests that many safety benchmarks for AI correlate with AI systems' capabilities. The researchers propose an empirical foundation for developing "more meaningful" safety metrics, which they hope will "[advance] the science" of safety evaluations in AI.

In a technical paper published Tuesday, Japanese AI company Sakana AI detailed Transformer², an AI system that dynamically adjusts to new tasks. Transformer² first analyzes a task to understand its requirements, then applies "task-specific adaptations" and optimizations to tune to that task. Sakana says the methods behind Transformer² can be applied to open models such as Meta's Llama and offer "a glimpse into a future where AI models are no longer static."

Finally, a small team of developers has released an open alternative to AI-powered search engines like Perplexity and OpenAI's SearchGPT. Called PrAIvateSearch, the project is available on GitHub under an MIT license, meaning that it can be used largely without restriction. It's powered by openly available AI models and services, including Alibaba's Qwen family of models and the search engine DuckDuckGo.