For some perspective here, The US spends ~$90b on all higher education institution research combined each year with over half of that funding coming from the government. The 42 federally funded national research labs only had something like $29.3b spent on R&D in 2023 and only a portion of that is allowed to be spent on non-weapons research. Google alone is spending over $100b on just deep mind R&D this year. So, all academia and all the federally funded research labs would have to have agreed to stop working on anything else to pool enough resources together to provide equivalent support for deep mind. This would've required many government officials and entities to have the foresight to see the potential impact of deep mind and be willing to sacrifice all the other interests they have asking for funding. imo if federal government were funding deep mind this significantly in this alternate timeline it would be focused towards weapons research and wartime applications cause over half of the national labs funding is spent on weapons R&D.
Used to be the worlds top supercomputer infra was in national labs or such places and not private companies. Some of the largest are still there. In my hypothetical that would be the case "assuming same resources."
