The Government Built the Internet. Why Didn’t It Build AI?

Hey guys, I just red an article from the CEO of Microsoft who said: “It will cost 'hundreds of billions' to keep up with frontier AI in the next decade.” The article sent me in a rabbit hole and made me think how other life changing events in our history kick-started. And every single time - the government played a big role in making it possible. Take for example the internet… DoD funded early networking research during the Cold War. During the 1980s, the National Science Foundation built NSFNET, expanding internet access to universities and research institutions across the U.S. NASA is another great example! SpaceX, Blue Origin and others wouldn’t be here today if the government didn’t kickstarted space exploration and space travel. Those companies today are building on top of a strong foundation that they wouldn’t had the money to support and reach. The government helped kickstart AI through funding universities and research programs like DARPA and the NSF, but unlike the space race, it never built the equivalent of a NASA for AI. There was no national organization tasked with building frontier AI models or the massive compute infrastructure needed to get there. Instead, OpenAI, Google, Anthropic and the other usual suspects are burning tens of billions on GPUs, data centers and research to build what has effectively become national-scale infrastructure. The question is whether this is how it should have happened, or whether governments should have built the foundation first and let the private sector build on top of it…just like they did with the internet, GPS and the space program. What I’m lacking is one centralised agency like NASA who is overseeing the creation and development of AI. Yes, government subsidies research still but most of the weight is in private companies, who simply will run out of money at some point because it’s early and don’t have the foundation that NASA built for the private aerospace sector. Let me know what you think!