How big could an “AI Manhattan Project” get?

In November, the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission listed that its top recommendation to Congress was to “establish and fund a Manhattan Project-like program dedicated to racing to and acquiring an Artificial General Intelligence capability.” Over the last few months, the US Department of Energy has also repeatedly compared AI to the Manhattan Project and indicated that it would use its power to help the project succeed, recently tweeting this: But what would a “Manhattan Project for AI” actually entail? It’s not entirely clear, but we think that three distinct features capture much of the essence of what people are referring to: It’s a project initiated by the US government Private sector AI resources (e.g. compute) are consolidated Total compute investments reach a similar fraction of US GDP as the peak of the Manhattan Project or the Apollo program In addition to these core properties, for the purposes of this analysis we focus primarily on the physical bottlenecks to

In November, the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission listed that its top recommendation to Congress was to “establish and fund a Manhattan Project-like program dedicated to racing to and acquiring an Artificial General Intelligence capability.” Over the last few months, the US Department of Energy has also repeatedly compared AI to the Manhattan Project and indicated that it would use its power to help the project succeed, recently tweeting this: But what would a “Manhattan Project for AI” actually entail? It’s not entirely clear, but we think that three distinct features capture