Comment by simonh

Japan generally. They tried to pull a great leap forward move with AI a few decades ago, but just ended up wasting billions on dead end approaches right on the cusp of the AI winter. My personal opinion is that really top notch breakthrough software engineering and computer science is susceptible to an exponential cascade butterfly effect.

Yes you need big teams to deliver huge projects. Operating systems, compilers, languages, etc all take huge investment to build out. The thing is though the initial conditions have a massive downstream effect. The core contributions by genius 10x computer scientists and software engineers set the pace for everyone else. Unix, C, Linux, Git, LLVM, Perl, Python, who knows what else. It's the individuals or small dedicated teams doing it the 'wrong' way, or going for a weird untested approach that starts a small speck that snowballs into huge multi-billion industries.

The culture and economic conditions in the US are perfect for this to work. Japan, and for different reasons and certainly not the the same scale Europe, not so much.