Submitted by mckirkus t3_11bb4r0 in singularity
I think this is call for a special kind of investment, the kind that was used to fund the Manhattan Project. The US Government is simply too slow moving to handle this appropriately in the short run so it's not strange that they're getting pressure from private industry to get ahead of what could be an existential threat. This feels similar to how the atom bomb was handled. A bit of history:
> In January 1933, the Nazis came to power in Germany and suppressed Jewish scientists. Like many others Leó Szilárd fled to London where in 1934, he patented the idea of a nuclear chain reaction via neutrons. The patent also introduced the term critical mass to describe the minimum amount of material required to sustain the chain reaction and its potential to cause an explosion (British patent 630,726). The patent was not about an atomic bomb per se, as the possibility of chain reaction was still very speculative. Szilard subsequently assigned the patent to the British Admiralty so that it could be covered by the Official Secrets Act.[4] In a very real sense, Szilard was the father of the atomic bomb academically.
If we in the US recruited all of our best and brightest and spent some of that $Trillon annual DoD budget on infrastructure and staffing for truly large scale models, it's likely we will get there before China.
It's frankly a bit disturbing that he had to call this out as it may imply the government is not doing much on this front. On the other hand, we seem to be hell bent on preventing China from reclaiming Taiwan (and TSMC). Intel is cutting salaries and laying off so I don't think the Government is subsidizing US chip infrastructure much.