WASHINGTON, DC – JULY 23: US President Donald Trump speaks during the “Winning the AI Race” Summit hosted by the All-In Podcast and Hill & Valley Forum at Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium on July 23, 2025 in Washington, DC. Trump signed executive orders on the Artificial Intelligence Action Plan during the event. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Getty Images
Capitalism is too fast for governments. Which means Artificial Intelligence (AI) is very fast.
As Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang regularly points out, thirty days in artificial intelligence is an eternity. It’s his way of conveying the critical truth to Nvidia employees that in their industry, stasis is the fast track to obsolescence.
The speed at which AI is evolving shows why the federal government should not have an investor or ownership role in AI. This assesses stress as President Trump and Senator Bernie Sanders are calling for just that. No thank you.
It’s clear that Sanders and Trump have missed that if the federal government had an ownership role, its employees wouldn’t have the faintest idea what they actually own. See Jensen Huang again.
The federal government’s vision for artificial intelligence is so old primitive. It recalls a recent comment by Nader Khalil, co-founder of Brev.dev, an Nvidia holding company. He noted that more lines of code have been written this year than in the entire history of computing. It brings to life what Huang means about the concept of time in the field of artificial intelligence. The present is the past.
Which means government investment in AI would be dated, if not inadequate. Valuable capital that supports the past.
To which Sanders and Trump could say the federal government would sign up all kinds of AI experts to secure an elite collection of AI real estate for taxpayers to own. The view is not serious.
First, no AI investor of any substance would employ the federal government as such. Doing so would potentially mean giving up billions. Only for the story to get worse.
As is almost always the case with politicians, they only see successes. Trump and Sanders look to OpenAI, Anthropic, and Cerebra to name just three top techies, and tell themselves that the government should have a piece of this sure-to-be-lucrative action. Investing in AI made easy…
But as the investors in all three might tell them, these are the phenomena. The invisible is all the investments in high-potential tech companies that don’t just fail, but fail fast.
That’s where federal ownership of AI investments becomes horrific. Just because most business investments in the tech space fail, the government can’t own it. It can’t simply because relentless tech failure is the industry’s fodder. How else to generate abundant wealth (think information) without making routine mistakes?
Except the government doesn’t make mistakes. Instead, it repeatedly subsidizes failure. As opposed to creating wealth, politicians want to create jobs. It signals even more valuable capital stuck in the past, as opposed to flowing into the next.
The simple, crucial truth lost on politicians terrified of corporate failure and unemployment is that what we call “the economy” gains substantial strength from periods of weakness. How else to free up human and physical capital to put it to better use? Except politics and periodic weakness don’t mix.
Which means politics and AI don’t mix. As every great commercial leap in history reminds us, there are many failures on the road to success. Since politicians can’t enjoy their share of failure, their investments will harshly and dangerously limit successes.
