I didn't have budgets handy, but GDP is another way to normalise its cost to the country; ~$2.2B cost in 1942 with a nominal GDP of $166B, nominal GDP of $29.2T in 2024 puts the Manhattan Project's cost relative to GDP at $386B in 2024.

Nominal GDP from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_statistics_of_the_Uni...

I wasn't actually comparing it in terms of dollars for dollars between the projects, more the national security aspect and the probability of the government pulling whatever levers are necessary to keep it going.

> I don't actually think the current administration, or the people behind it, actually care about real world economics anymore.

They are aristocrats. They are worried about accumulating more power then their peers, about alliances to gain that power, and about projecting an image of infallibility.

Aristocracy has never been known for caring for economics, technology or practical matters. They just care about power. Ruining nations, building useless vanity projects and going to war is kind of their main thing.

> That's the difference between innovating and copying/distilling someone else's innovation.

Aren't the models from Anthropic and OpenAI simply the distilled work of everyone else who ever put their work online, or in books?

Why is their distillation okay, but other distillations not ok?

As opposed to all the copying AI companies have done of everyone else's work, in order to build something that tries to replace and undercuts the people who did that work?

World's smallest violin.

This meme must die, how did Kimi 3 even distill Fable or GPT 5.6 within weeks of their being available?

Also, how a model identifies itself isn't very telling, many models when asked in Chinese will identify as DeepSeek

Or maybe China's math/science/population/gov investment powerhouse is pulling ahead and becoming unstoppable?

I'll link to this comment as a rebuttal https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48984531

That's an ironic comment to make about LLMs that are heavily reliant on copying/distilling everyone's work (or as Damien Walter puts it, our Collective Intelligence).

This is a cope.

The US also stole patens and ideas from other countries. So did Germany and Italy and pretty much every other country on this planet. Yeah, it is true that the US doesn't like a challenger here and when someone doesn't play by the rules that they want to set, they get upset. Everything is true, yes.