Many people see the AI shift as only an industrialist initiative. A few say, "They are gambling with our lives for profit." A few think, "This is the biggest scam in history, nothing will happen without a bubble." And a few believe, "This is the best time to earn."
Though these views are arguably not wrong, they are most probably incomplete. The AI shift is not only an industrialist initiative. It is a political initiative, a scientific initiative, and also a big ideological initiative. To ignore them means to ignore roughly half of the AI shift.
We can start from a few days ago when Dario Amodei said we should slow down the AI race. Sam Altman agreed, and Elon Musk agreed too. The US government said there would not be any regulation. In the next week, we saw Elon's new model, Grok 4.7, then Opus 5.5 the next day, and GPT-6.1 Sol a week after that. (We now also have Gemini Argon and Dot too.)
It can seem like, "If I don't destroy the world, someone else will," but it's something more than that. I don't think we should blame or praise the US or Chinese government for this. They have to do it.
Firstly, whoever makes AGI first, reaching them will probably be impossible for the others. It will be an intelligence explosion, and it could improve itself exponentially. Or if someone wants to invent something faster by being intelligent, they will need a being more intelligent than that "AGI". So, even if they could invent something, it will take them more time to invent it than that "AGI".
Secondly, even if, for some fundamental scientific reason, we find it impossible to make this kind of exponential general intelligence, there is no doubt this is a historical, super-powerful technology, and whoever wins the race will be the first to write the rules for it. So, why would one country give another country a chance to make it irrelevant!
And here, the political effects of the national and international race influence the work through the veins of the industries. For example, the US government rejected the "AI pace regulation," so companies don't have to worry about growing faster because of laws. If the government didn't permit it, very few indie researchers or scientists could do it, and only secretly or barely. Moreover, the governments are giving them first priority for land, electricity, security, and any legal permissions.
The Stargate (even though the money is coming from private organizations) was launched at the White House, and Trump announced it. On the other hand, in China, Bloomberg reported in June that Beijing is preparing about 2 trillion yuan (~$295B) over five years for national AI data centers. (I was just thinking, the Manhattan Project was just a project of 2 billion dollars at that time!)
Among the industries, most of the VCs are focusing on the AI industry the most. As far as I know, every batch in YC this year had more than 50% AI startups, and nowadays, it surprises me when a funded startup doesn't have "AI" in its name.
Why are they investing here?
This is the case now, but if the investors had invested in Geoffrey Hinton's research and in AI, the rise of AI could have happened many years ago (fortunately, it didn't!). But I don't think any industrialist would invest or any entrepreneur would take risks like now, if Demis, Hinton, and the other scientists and AI researchers had not invented the backbone of LLMs and proved it.
Yeah, now the investors are increasing, and the government is giving support and security. This is normal, though; it happened with most revolutionary technologies. The investors and founders are hopeful that it will give them a treasure of money, and the nations are optimistic that it will be the future of their world.
This caused more people to come into the AI industry. The founders working on AI startups are getting more priority from investors, and scientists and researchers are getting more prestige and funding for working in the AI field than in others. And as there is funding, patronage, and prestige here, more people are coming here, and this is increasing day by day. I mean, the complex is becoming stronger.
So, to speak (it is actually not linear, but I am simplifying it): the scientists and researchers innovated first, the investors and founders spent some money, and yeah, this technology worked! Now the investors are giving it the most money, the politicians are giving it the most priority, so the scientists and academics are giving it more prestige, the scientists, researchers, and startup founders are coming here more, and the more of them see the opportunity here, the more of them are coming.
his was a simplified version of the structure the AI shift is driven by, the scientific-industrial complex, and the things we are watching as effects of this shift are: