That would be pretty foolish, given the fact that every hand crafted model eventually gets surpassed with brute force. A better use of time would be tackling whatever you mean by "complexity of further scaling has reached geopolitical proportions". I'm not a fan of it, as it is terribly inelegant, but denying the years of consistent brute force wins would just be silly.
The best strategy for any nation with an interest in AI (be it economic or something much more skynety) would be securing two things very quickly: fabrication capacity and nuclear power, because this stuff is going to be measure megawatts - not ANN layers. Improving the efficiency of that conversion would certainly be helpful, but history has shown that to be a lower priority, just take a look at how ridiculously deep software stacks are compared to 20 years ago. I really wish the linguists had been proven right in the 1970s...