With Trump and his high-tech team coming into power, it is a dream come true for the AI promotion crowd.
25 November 2024 – America wants its own Manhattan Project for “AGI”. The bipartisan US-China Economic and Security Review Commission has proposed an ambitious program to Congress to prevent China from overtaking America’s lead in AI. With Trump and his high-tech team coming into power (“all regulation guardrails are off for building AI!!”) it is a dream come true for the AI promotion crowd.
The original Manhattan Project only cost about $30 billion in today’s terms, equivalent to the amount VCs invested in generative AI in 2023 alone.
However the critical challenge isn’t financial, it’s infrastructural. And this is where the government can significantly help. The United States has a head start in the industry and the finances, but it lacks access to energy – potentially diminishing the nation’s current advantage. Over the past decade, China has added 37 nuclear reactors to its grid. The US? Just two. AGI is likely to require a lot of energy to build and to run in the coming years. If the US can’t cut through regulations and mobilise resources to invigorate its energy infrastructure buildout, China could have the momentum to overtake.
China has already turned adversity into advantage. In a dialectical irony that would make Marx proud, the very constraints of chip sanctions have pushed it to develop remarkably efficient models, such as DeepSeek, rivaling OpenAI’s o1 on benchmarks.
See also:
- While most countries can’t compete with the US and China in frontier AI development, they can still find strategic niches to thrive in the AI revolution. Eric Schmidt’s column in The Economist is worth a read.
