It sounds like there are two very different concerns here.
One is how large the project is. $100M vs. $1Billion.
The second is how “gradual” that project can be. Like, can it start small, or do we need to allocate $100M at once?
The concern i was bringing up was more about the latter. My main point was just that we should generally prioritize projects that can be neatly scaled up over ones that require a huge upfront cost.
In fairness, I think most of the suggested examples are things that have nice ramps of scaling them up. For example, the nuclear funding gap seems fairly gradual, and the Anthropic team seems to be mainly progressing ideas that they worked on from OpenAI.
Projects I’d be more concerned are ones like, ”We’ve never done this sort of thing before, we really can’t say how successful it will be, but here’s $100M, and it needs to be spent very quickly using plans that can’t change much at all.”
I’m not that concerned about the $100M vs. $1Bil difference. Many groups grow over time, so I’d imagine that most exciting $100M projects would be very likely to reach $1Bil after a few years.
It sounds like there are two very different concerns here.
One is how large the project is. $100M vs. $1Billion.
The second is how “gradual” that project can be. Like, can it start small, or do we need to allocate $100M at once?
The concern i was bringing up was more about the latter. My main point was just that we should generally prioritize projects that can be neatly scaled up over ones that require a huge upfront cost.
In fairness, I think most of the suggested examples are things that have nice ramps of scaling them up. For example, the nuclear funding gap seems fairly gradual, and the Anthropic team seems to be mainly progressing ideas that they worked on from OpenAI.
Projects I’d be more concerned are ones like,
”We’ve never done this sort of thing before, we really can’t say how successful it will be, but here’s $100M, and it needs to be spent very quickly using plans that can’t change much at all.”
I’m not that concerned about the $100M vs. $1Bil difference. Many groups grow over time, so I’d imagine that most exciting $100M projects would be very likely to reach $1Bil after a few years.