I truly believe if we took a measely $50b out of the LLM world we could create trillion dollar economies from basic research within 10 years. I personally know folks who have intuitive understanding of things that can't get funding to be studied. If we could keep the money away from university upper management, it'd cost $10b max.

Oh and while we're at it, $20b a year would house every homeless person in the US - there's a hell of a lot of extremely high intelligence and low social cohesion folks who can't handle the extractive punitive system we have. Our ability to deliver opportunity to create lucky situations for ourselves is getting worse and worse

$50B is essentially 100% of the annual NIH budget, which funds the vast majority of JUST life sciences basic research. So you may want to update your beliefs

e: oh and while we're at it, California spent over $24 billion over a five-year period (2019–2024) specifically targeting homelessness