AI is a useful tool that still needs more scientists working on it, and the US should be building more data centers so it doesn't fall behind China.

The development and quality of AI is non-linear. The first revolutionary Text Generative AI paper was published in 2017. ChatGPT was released in 2022. The development in machine learning between 2022 and 2026 makes 2017-to-2022 look like a snail's pace. That means the cost of delay will be multiplied many times in the future. Wasting one year maybe mean that your models are 50% the quality of the state-of-the-art models.

I do not want China to be the leader in AI. AI has useful civilian, economic, and military applications. For that power and leadership to fall to a country with no democratic elections or accountability to public dissent would be disastrous.