The OP speculates on why the Trump administration would change direction. Like so many they omit the reason staring everyone in the face: It's a way to acquire more power and wealth for Trump and allies, and more leverage.

AI is the highest growth industry in the world, and the most powerful technological change. Any democratic government would seek to control and harness such a thing to the public interest, and the Trump administration's general vision of the democratic public interest is more power for the office of the POTUS. Imagine the power, wealth, and leverage of controlling AI models and virtually any aspect of them by being able to control their release and content. Imagine the control over content in the US and worldwide, controlling the output of almost every LLM.

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Supermancho 12 hours ago | parent [-]

There had to have been a trigger that caused the shift, even if that trigger was a momentum threshold...which had to manifest as signal.

What didn't happen was irrational and self-oblivious leadership noticing they had been acting irrationally for years. "the potential" of wealth or power was present long before this shift.

	▲	mmooss 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		You might overestimate the understanding of people outside the tech bubble. Most don't understand or believe what LLMs can do, and humans have a unavoidable habit of sticking their heads in the sand about disruptive change . That is especially true in a large, heavily bureaucratic organization with a culture of highly-centralized top-down decision-making by the boss - an 80 year-old, non-technical boss - and which priortizes loyalty to and pleasing the boss over expertise and speaking the truth.