Comment by resters

I agree this law won’t be effective in its intended purpose, and that China will develop models of their own that are sufficiently competitive (as we’ve already seen). However, I think seeking “peaceful collaboration” between the US (or Europe or many others) and China - either between governments or private firms - is a naive strategy that will simply lead to the US being replaced by a more dangerous superpower that does not respect the values of free and democratic societies.

I also think that to a great extent, we’re already at war. China has not respected intellectual property rights, conducted espionage against both companies and government agencies, repeatedly performed successful cyberattacks, helped Russia in the Ukraine conflict, severed telecommunications cables, and more. They’ve also built up the world’s largest navy, expanded their nuclear arsenal, and are working on projects to undermine the status of the US Dollar. All of this should have been met with a much stronger and forceful reaction, since clearly it does not fit into the notion of “peaceful collaboration”.

China’s unpeaceful actions aren’t limited to the West. China annexed much of its current territory illegally and through force (see Xinjiang and Tibet). When Hong Kong was handed back, it was under a treaty that China now says is not valid. China has been trying to steal territory from neighboring countries repeatedly, for example with Bhutan or India. They’ve also threatened to take over Taiwan many times now, and may do so soon. They’re about to build a dam that will prevent water from reaching Bangladesh and force them to become subjugated. The only peaceful and just outcome is for those territories to be freed from the control of China - which will require help from the West (sanctions, tariffs, blockades, and maybe even direct intervention).

Even within China, the CCP rules with an iron fist and violates virtually all principles of free societies and classically liberal values that we value in the West. I don’t see that changing. And if it doesn’t, how can they be trusted with more economic and military power? That’s why I don’t think we should seek peaceful collaboration with China. We just need smarter strategies than this hasty AI declaration.

> The US is moving toward a system where government controls and throttles technology and picks winners

What else can it do? They don’t want to lose their lead, and whatever restrictions they’ve been putting on China et al. have let the exact desired outcomes so far. The idea is to try to slow down the beast that has very set goals (e.g. to become high tech manufacturing and innovation center), and try to play catch up (like on-shoring some manufacturing).

Personally, I’m skeptical that it will work, because by raw number of hands on deck, they have the advantage. And it’s fairly hard when your institutional knowledge of doing big things is a bit outdated. I would argue, a good bet in North America would be finding a financially engineered solution to get Asian companies bring their workers and knowledge to ramp us up. Kinda like the TSMC factory. Basically the same thing as China did in 2000s with western companies.

Training an AGI/ASI does not requires the biggest datacenters/massive GPUs, nor it takes years already. Early algorithmic advances and narrow AGI AIs have radically shortened the requirements in hardware and time of training.

You can only expect more algorithmic advances from now on.

The attempt of regulation falls within the limits of the (publicly available) SOTA AI technology from maybe a month ago, so it has been surpased by the reality of no one capable of being in control of the brain functions outside the selected countries for free interoperation of AI tech.

Those brains outside the wire were six months ago already creating the algorithmic breakthroughs we are currently witnessing, of course there's not only one (there are most certainly many improvements currently being pipelined for future models a few months from now), and they are actually fully independant of regulations from any country, you can expect just in this year, lots of radical breakthroughs, and given the new regulations, more players just further advancing the algorithmic side of the technology.

The regulation could have been effective only in an scenario where US and selected countries would control the fully indispensable hardware required to train and run advanced AI, which is not anymore indispensable.

The most radical forecastings clock the future (months, not years), training and deploying of frontier AIs (AGI/ASI level), at maybe weeks to few months of training using sintetic generated data (from opensource models already available), simply relying on standard datacenter level CPUs (not GPUs) for the backbone of the training infrastructure, and a light, precise use of limited GPUs (two, three years old datacenter GPU hardware), and distributing the training across several massive datacenters, if you care at all about speed (having the most advanced AI the faster you can). But anyway, the jumping forward framework could be just doing incremental advances, and letting the advanced AIs to just improve the algorithmic side of the technology development, so to just further making even more efficient the available hardware, one cycle of improvement at a time.

It's not a game over with hardware, US and allies could try to use to jump faster to more sophisticated AI, but the game cannot be controlled just by limiting the hardware, nor the difussion of advanced models.

> The US is moving toward a system where government controls and throttles technology and picks winners.

Moving towards? The US has a pretty solid history of doing a great deal of this (and more) in the 20th century. But so did all of the world's powers... as they all continue to do today. It seems to be an inherent part of being a world power.

I don't think you're wrong but Big Tech is bending the knee to Trump because he will be picking the winners.