Comment by pear01

Well, people bid for USA government resources all the time. It's why the Washington DC suburbs have some of the country's most affluent neighborhoods among their ranks.

In theory it makes the process more transparent and fair, although slower. That calculus has been changing as of late, perhaps for both good and bad. See for example the Pentagon's latest support of drone startups run by twenty-year-olds.

The question of public and private distinctions in these various schemes are very interesting and imo, underexplored. Especially when you consider how these private LLMs are trained on public data.