This feels incoherent. I'm game to agree that there were and are poor decisions being made. But are you proposing that we could have stopped all progress until these vague concerns were addressed?

For some of the concerns, like language understanding, I can't bring myself to think that many of the experts out there were doing any better than these models can do today. Quite the contrary.

And do you think that that would not have been counter to the concern over diversity of teams working on it?

Or concerns over bias going away by having the US attempt to abstain? Good luck with that. It sucks, but China and Russia should stand as stark examples that it turns out you can take strong control over the internet.