“What distinguishes leaders from laggards and greatness from mediocrity is the ability to uniquely imagine what could be,” American author Robert Fritz once boldly asserted.
With artificial general intelligence on the horizon and with the U.S. edge in artificial intelligence systems dwindling by the day, ROF's Sébastien Laye explains in the Washington Examiner that the stakes are increasing for America to step up its artificial general intelligence game.
The risks for U.S. leadership are significant. As we have seen with numerous benchmarks — the Turing Test, exhibiting human intelligence equivalent behavior, was officially passed by AI once and for all last week — the Trump administration needs to get serious about the approaching AGI horizon and care about its definition. No one wants to see XYZ lab in Silicon Valley coming up with its own definition of AGI and suddenly claiming the prize.
The Chinese are leading contenders too, but I do not believe the Deep Seek/cheap models/open-source triad really matter here for AGI. These will be valuable following AGI’s arrival. And that’s where the United States finds itself in a predicament. It currently holds the most formidable, unassailable position for AI diffusion: it leads in semiconductor design, data centers, chips, commercial models and deployment. Yes, there are some weak spots, despite the smart decisions taken by the new Administration (deregulation, energy, permitting, project Stargate and the massive infrastructure effort).
As recently observed by Navin Girishankar and Matt Pearl at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, we lack a cohesive digital infrastructure when it comes to networks, grids, and communications infrastructures. Our telecommunications equipment makers are global laggards, and if the administration is so proactive for data centers and chip manufacturing, it should also take care of digital infrastructure.
… One reason the AGI race is imbalanced is that it pits Silicon Valley against China. The Chinese Communist Party can really structure the whole pipeline of efforts, even though it also relies on a bevy of companies. Thus far, the U.S. has let Silicon Valley rule the game. The U.S. free market system believes that entrepreneurs and innovators are the ones who will eventually win the race against the authoritarian states.
WHY TRUMP’S TARIFFS ARE HARMFUL
Nevertheless, it is time for the Trump administration to go all in. Silicon Valley has no strategic experience in counterespionage, security, and military applications, albeit slowly changing with Anduril and Palantir. The federal government needs to boldly step up to structure the nationwide AGI effort. It should take the burden of security and safety from the commercial labs. The Defense Department can share crucial physical information, for example, to accelerate AI research and robotics and to allow companies to manufacture cutting-edge products for national defense.
More importantly, there are aspects of AGI that the commercial laws are not focused on. We should fund public research at the National Science Foundation laboratories, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and the AI Safety Institute. We should also pursue moonshot projects that will complement commercial models. Only through this public-private, coordinated effort will we triumph when it comes to new powerful AI systems.
Also by Sébastien Laye: • Trumponomics — What Does It Entail, How Is It Misunderstood, and What Is Trump's Endgame?
• Why Does Donald Trump Bother the Élites in France and Europe So Much?
