Note that 'bits' are a lot easier to move from one place to another than hardware. If invented at 9 am it could be on the other side of the globe before you're back from your coffee break at 9:15. This is not at all like almost all other trade secrets and industrial gear, it's software. Leaks are pretty much inevitable and once it is shown that it can be done it will be done in other places as well.
That said, any given government may be thinking like Zuckerberg[0] or senator Blumenthal[1], so perhaps these governments are just flag-waving what they think is an investment opportunity without any real understanding…
[0] general lack of vision, thinking of "superintelligence" in terms of what can be done with/by the Star Trek TNG era computer, rather than other fictional references such as a Culture Mind or whatever: https://archive.ph/ZZF3y
[1] "I alluded, in my opening remarks, to the jobs issue, the economic effects on employment. I think you have said, in fact, and I'm going to quote, ``Development of superhuman machine intelligence is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity,'' end quote. You may have had in mind the effect on jobs, which is really my biggest nightmare, in the long term." - https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CHRG-118shrg52706/html/C...
China did the same thing when their tech-bros got too big for their boots.
Seriously, our government just announced it's slashing half a billion dollars in vaccine research because "vaccines are deadly and ineffective", and it fired a chief statistician because the president didn't like the numbers he calculated, and it ordered the destruction of two expensive satellites because they can observe politically inconvenient climate change. THOSE are the people you are trusting to keep an eye on the pace of development inside of private, secretive AGI companies?
If you're wondering how they'll know it's happening, the USA has had DARPA monitoring stuff like this since before OpenAI existed.
While one in particular is speedracing into irrelevance, it isn't particularly representative of the rest of the developed world (and hasn't in a very long time, TBH).
Like how I can say that the future of USA's AI is probably going to obliterate your local job market regardless of which country you're in, and regardless of whether you think there's "no identified use-case" for AI. Like a steamroller vs a rubber chicken. But probably Google's AI rather than OpenAI's, I think Gemini 3 is going to be a much bigger upgrade, and Google doesn't have cashflow problems. And if any single country out there is actually preparing for this, I haven't heard about it.
Accusations about being off-topic is really pushing it: you want to bet on governments' incompetence in dealing with AI, and I don't (on the basis that there are unarguably still many functional democracies out there), on the other hand, the thread you started about the state of Europe's AI industry had nothing to do with that.
> Like how I can say that the future of USA's AI is probably going to obliterate your local job market regardless of which country you're in
Nobody knows what the future of AI is going to look like. At present, LLMs/"GenAI" it is still very much a costly solution in need of a problem to solve/a market to serve¹. And saying that the USA is somehow uniquely positioned there sounds uninformed at best: there is no moat, all of this development is happening in the open, with AI labs and universities around the world reproducing this research, sometimes for a fraction of the cost.
> And if any single country out there is actually preparing for this, I haven't heard about it.
What is "this", effectively? The new flavour Gemini of the month (and its marginal gains on cooked-up benchmarks)? Or the imminent collapse of our society brought by a mysterious deus ex machina-esque AGI we keep hearing about but not seeing? Since we are entitled to our opinions, still, mine is that LLMs are a mere local maxima towards any useful form of AI, barely more noteworthy (and practical) than Markov chains before it. Anything besides LLMs is moot (and probably a good topic to speculate about over the impending AI winter).
¹: https://www.anthropic.com/news/the-anthropic-economic-index
Is there a source for this other than "trust me bro"? DARPA isn't a spy agency, it's a research organization.
> governments won't "look ahead", they'll just panic when AGI is happening
Assuming the companies tell them, or that there are shadowy deep-cover DARPA agents planted at the highest levels of their workforce.
Please don't cross into personal attack, no matter how wrong another commenter is or you feel they are.
Maybe you can post a link in case anyone else is as clumsy with search engines as I am? After all, you can google it just as fast as you claim I can.
Do you mean from ChatGPT launch or o1 launch? Curious to get your take on how they bungled the lead and what they could have done differently to preserve it. Not having thought about it too much, it seems that with the combo of 1) massive hype required for fundraising, and 2) the fact that their product can be basically reverse engineered by training a model on its curated output, it would have been near impossible to maintain a large lead.
Basically, OpenAI poked a sleeping bear, then lost all their lead, and are now at risk of being mauled by the bear. My money would be on the bear, except I think the Pentagon is an even bigger sleeping bear, so that's where I would bet money (literally) if I could.
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/06/openai-is-giving-chatgpt-to-...
https://www.gsa.gov/about-us/newsroom/news-releases/gsa-prop...
Announced exactly 1 day before the $1 thing, to make everything extra muddled.
https://www.gsa.gov/about-us/newsroom/news-releases/gsa-anno...