It's hard to know how much this effort is about the government's belief in AI, and how much of it is about supporting the technology sector while using AI as a convenient buzzword.
I think, though, that even if LLMs turn out to be a dead-end and don't progress much further... there are a lot of benefits here.
One of the US's key strategic advantages is brain drain.
We are one of the world's premier destinations for highly educated, highly skilled people from other countries. Their loss, our gain.
There are of course myriad other countries where they could go, many of them more attractive than the US in various ways. Every country in the world is in a sense competing for this talent.
As of this year, the US employment-based green card backlog for citizens of India is such that they're currently still processing applications filed in 2019 for the top EB-1 category (that's "Extraordinary People, Outstanding Researchers and Professors, and Multinational Executives and Managers"), and 2012 for mere PhDs. So the numbers would have to go down a lot for US to even notice.
Speaking as an immigrant myself, so long as there's still noticeable wealth disparity, people will make the jump. The other aspect that makes US specifically especially attractive compared to some others is its family immigration policy - people generally want their family to join them eventually, and US has an unusually large allotment for that compared to many other countries.
zero sum thinking has already infected public policy. turns out liberals can be just as "they took our jobs" as the redneck conservative.
the real fear should be that people wouldnt want to come. already chinese intl students are break even when considering US vs going back to china. who wants to deal with all the bureaucracy and hatred when they could just go back and work for deepseek.
I think, though, that even if LLMs turn out to be a dead-end and don't progress much further... there are a lot of benefits here.
One of the US's key strategic advantages is brain drain.
We are one of the world's premier destinations for highly educated, highly skilled people from other countries. Their loss, our gain.
There are of course myriad other countries where they could go, many of them more attractive than the US in various ways. Every country in the world is in a sense competing for this talent.