To tie this up and into now, a few more things:

4. This is some pretty kinder political manuevering by everyone. The companies are getting a Trump endorsement and publicity (this seemed better before Deepseek came through), Trump signaling distance from Elon by working something big into the schedule for Thiel on Day 2 ("But I can still do press conference after, Peter, that's the only, you know I love to do it").

5. Contrary to what you might/should suspect, this has nothing to do with government funding. Yet. But this would be exactly how you'd start trying to normalize that, right outta the gate. Other statements like Andreesen's "Deepseek is a Sputnik moment" are doing the same, invoking national security threat arguments to justify tax funding. Yeah man, to beat the Soviets, we gave our public tax dollars to only a few private companies, who would then charge us membership fees later for stuff like viewing the Hubble Space Telescope's photos. And that seems fine to us! Great analogy, man.

6. It's sad some that of the worst circles of people I've ever learned of, the memecoin NFTers, the tech grifters, etc. are now the loudest group reinforcing the "we need massive gov't AI investments for national defense!" narrative. And yeup, they'll almost certainly get those massive government subsidies, because the call is coming from inside the White House, now. Like... "hmm, there's no specifics given in this press conference about how OpenAI actually achieves $500 billion dollars or more, and OpenAI's owners also financed the vice president's political career... I wonder how much it really costs Donald Trump to simply sign an executive order for $400 billion hand-lovingly re-appropriated from what were the civil service branches and now given to OpenAI?"

did we go private yet