This week a major US AI development flew under the radar - a US congressional commission, the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission (USCC) presented their annual report to congress.

Their number one recommendation was that Congress establish a "Manhattan Project-like program dedicated to racing to and acquiring an Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) capability".

There's a lot to say about this, which I cover in the piece.

A "Manhattan Project to build AGI" seem pretty questionable. With the actual Manhattan project it was only the government that was able to work on the bomb as they had most of the resources. To this day it's hard to do a startup to knock out better nuclear warheads.

Whereas with AGI loads of companies are already on it and there isn't really reason to believe that a government entity would get there faster.

"born secret", maybe. But by a US government program? Lately besides corruption and inefficiencies, the government didn't have much to show. NASA go trounced hard by SpaceX.

The Kamala "broadband" project did cost $42 billion to taxpayers and not one home has been connected with this new program. In nearly four years. Zero. Meanwhile StarLink is actually connecting people.

Be it NVidia, OpenAI, Meta, Google, etc. all the models are coming from private companies. The government metastasized and seems to be unable to do anything besides create more pointless public servants.

They could spent 1 trillion on this (what's 1 trillion when you spent $42 billion to not connect a single home to broadband? and what's a trillion when you're already 36 trillion in debt), I still don't think the US goverment could beat private companies. Too much bureaucracy. Too many people with the sole goal of making the government ever bigger.

Now on a positive note (I guess), I'll grant everybody that it's even less likely that AGI would from the EU bureaucracy.

Is there a betting market for this?

I don’t care who is researching this, we won’t have AGI by 2027 and super intelligence by 2030s.

> Based on trends in AI capabilities research since GPT-2, we are on course to expect AGI by 2027. Once AGI capability is available, if labs focus on automating AI research itself, progress in AI should accelerate. If similar progress can be achieved as the phase from GPT-2 to GPT-4, or GPT-4 to AGI, we should expect Superintelligence before the end of the decade.

It's a good idea. I don't think secrecy is really necessitated aside from the idea that if the US government is the one spending the money, then they should reap the benefits. Ideally, I'd love to see many governments collaborate here and share the technology with each other as a result.