I hate this for all the reasons, but given how much Americans hate their government is the government taking a steak in AI likely to improve people’s opinion of AI?
Seems to me that state sponsorship of ai platforms would violate separation of church and state given looney transhumanist ai fanfic is entirely unsupported by empiricism or mathematics. Again can anybody name an economcially useful technology an LLM invented? Maybe we can't because it is like asking for what a search engine invented. Adaptive general intelligence does not exist today and is provably unattainable by fixed weight tranformers interpolating over the human corpus. however rent seeking with their unproductive but persuasive technology is a great temporary survival strategy for OpenAI et al given they can't justify themselves in a competitive marketplace at the cost of us all. imagine if in 2000 the federal gov back-stopped pets.com because ecommerce was deemed in the national interest. lol.
If I were China or Russia I would want the US to invest deeply in the AI boondogle meanwhile I make or mine the things that actually matter in the world. Its like the US vs USSR defense spending war in reverse. if rivals can dupe the US into wasting money on useless "ai" while they build cheap energy or make physical products.
Specifically I think the risk profile these companies have decided to take on is such that the government is basically investing to mitigate bad decision making. These are basically most of the biggest companies in the US right now. Also, I think Trump has shown that the primary criteria for this is not merit but graft.
If these companies were in an earlier more precarious part of their research cycle, and if like multiple of his advisors and his VP weren’t industry insiders or paid by such I might be more in favor. But this is basically regulatory capture in steroids.
The economy is centralized in the magnificent ten enough.
Is this a claimed aim of the effort?