Eric Schmidt: I Used to Run Google. Silicon Valley Could Lose to China.

Dr. Schmidt is the chairman of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence and the Defense Innovation Board. He is the former chairman and C.E.O. of Google. Silicon Valley leaders may be putting too much faith in the private sector to ensure U.S. global leadership in new technology.

America’s companies and universities innovate like no other places on earth. We are garage start-ups, risk-taking entrepreneurs and intrepid scholars exploring new advances in science and technology. But that is only part of the story.

Many of Silicon Valley’s leaders got their start with grants from the federal government — including me. My graduate work in computer science in the 1970s and ’80s was funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Source: nytimes.com