Yes, sometimes they are slow, other times they are fast. A private effort to build a nuke or go to the moon in the time frames they did would not have been possible. AFAIK the assumption that Chinese AI development is government directed everyone agrees to, but for some very strange reason people like to think that US AI is directed by a group of quirky nerds that wants to save the world and just happens to get their hands on a MASSIVE amount of compute (worth billions upon billions of dollars). Imagine when the government gets to hear what these nerds are up to in a couple of years...
IF there is any truth to how important the race to AGI/ASI is to win.
THEN governments are the key-players in those races.
Yes, sometimes they are slow, other times they are fast. A private effort to build a nuke or go to the moon in the time frames they did would not have been possible. AFAIK the assumption that Chinese AI development is government directed everyone agrees to, but for some very strange reason people like to think that US AI is directed by a group of quirky nerds that wants to save the world and just happens to get their hands on a MASSIVE amount of compute (worth billions upon billions of dollars). Imagine when the government gets to hear what these nerds are up to in a couple of years...
IF there is any truth to how important the race to AGI/ASI is to win.
THEN governments are the key-players in those races.