I mean the AI companies probably just want to make American model pricing look ridiculous in comparison (it's working imo). I think the government probably wants actually-useful AI that could be put into chips and actually revolutionize factory work or mining or whatever. Large, SOTA models are not gonna change factory work but extremely efficient and optimized models may

Every industry-wide scale technological revolution has happened because government funded a technology and then opened it up to the masses. Just look at your iPhone: GPS, the internet, AI voice assistants, touchscreens, microprocessors, lithium-ion batteries, etc all came from gov't research (I'm counting Bell Labs' gov't mandated monopoly + research funding as gov't)

Economist Mariana Mazzucato wrote a great book about this called The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths