I’d rather stay far away from this parallel universe.

Why would you want my money to be used to build datacenter that won’t benefit me ? I might use a LLM once a month, many people never use it.

Let the one who use it pay for it.

If that did happen, how would the government then issue those resources?

OpenAI ask for 1m GPUs for a month, Anthropic ask for 2m, the government data center only has 500,000, and a new startup wants 750,000 as well.

Do you hand them out to the most convincing pitch? Hopefully not to the biggest donor to your campaign.

Now the most successful AI lab is the one that's best at pitching the government for additional resources.

UPDATE: See comment below for the answer to this question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46438390#46439067

In a completely alternate dimension, a quarter of the capital being invested in AI literally just goes towards making sure everyone has quality food and water.

Datacenters are not a natural monopoly, you can always build more. Beyond what the public sector itself might need for its own use, there's not much of a case for governments to invest in them.

That could make sense in some steady state regime where there were stable requirements and mature tech (I wouldn’t vote for it but I can see an argument).

I see no argument why the government would jump into a hype cycle and start building infra that speculative startups are interested in. Why would they take on that risk compared to private investors, and how would they decide to back that over mammoth cloning infra or whatever other startups are doing?

In a better parallel universe, we found a different innovation without using brute-force computation to train systems that unreliably and inefficiently compute things and still leaves us able to understand what we're building.

> governments invest in the compute/datacenters (read: infra), and let model makers compete on the same playing field

Hmm, what about member-owned coöperatives? Like what we have for stock exchanges.

Socialized losses, private profits

why would they do that? not to mention governments are already doing that indirectly by taking equity stakes in some of the companies.

That sounds like a nightmare.

Do you like this idea?

Prediction: on this thread you'll get a lot of talk about how government would slow things down. But when the AI bubble starts to look shaky, see how fast all the tech bros line up for a "public private partnership."

That seems like a terrible idea. Data centers aren’t a natural monopoly. Regulate the externalities and let it flourish.

That's malinvestment. Too much overhead, disconnected from long term demand. The government doesn't have expertise, isn't lean and nimble. What if it all just blows over? (It won't? But who knows?)

Everything is happening exactly as it should. If the "bubble" "pops", that's just the economic laws doing what they naturally do.

The government has better things to do. Geopolitics, trade, transportation, resources, public health, consumer safety, jobs, economy, defense, regulatory activities, etc.