Comment by parsimo2010
2 days ago
Traditional export control applied to advanced hardware is because the US doesn't want its adversaries to have access to things that erode the US military advantage. But most hardware is only controlled at the high-end of the market. Once a technology is commodotized, the low-end stuff is usually widely proliferated. Night vision goggles are an example, only the latest generation technology is controlled, and low-end stuff can be bought online and shipped worldwide.
Applying this to your thoughts about AI, is that as the efficiency of training gets better, the ability to train models is commodotized, and those models would not be considered to be advantageous and would not need to be controlled. So maybe setting the export control based on the number of operations is a good idea- it naturally allows efficiently trained models to be exported since they wouldn't be hard to train in other countries anyway.
As computing power scales maybe the 10^26 limit will need to be revised, but setting the limit based on the scale of the training is a good idea since it is actually measurable. You couldn't realistically set the limit based on the capability of the model since benchmarks seem become irrelevant every few months due to contamination.
I wonder what makes people believe that the US currently enjoys any kind of a meaningful "military advantage" over e.g. China? After failing to defeat the Taliban and running from the Houthis especially. This seems like a very dangerous belief to have. China has 4x the population and outproduces us 10:1 in widgets (2:1 in dollars). Considering just e.g. steel, China produces about 1 billion metric tons of it per year. We produce 80 million tons. Concrete? 2.4B tons vs 96M tons. 70+% of the world's electronics. Their shipbuilding industry is 230x more productive (not a typo). Etc, etc.
The short term profits US businesses have been enjoying over the past 25 years came at a staggering long term cost. The sanctions won't even slow down the Chinese MIC, and in the long run they will cause them to develop their own high end silicon sector (obviating the need for our own worldwide). They're already at 7nm, at a low yield. That is more than sufficient for their MIC, including the AI chips used there, currently and in the foreseeable future.
a) just because the government has policies that doesn’t mean they are 100% effective
b) export controls aren’t expected to completely prevent a country from gaining access to a technology, just make it take longer and require more resources to achieve
You may also be misunderstanding how much money China will spend to develop their semiconductor industry. Sure, they will eventually catch up to the West, but the money they spend along the way won’t be spent on fighter jet, missiles, and ships. It’s still preferable (from the US perspective) to having no export controls and China being able to import semiconductor designs, manufacturing hardware, and AI models trained using US resources. At least this way China is a few months behind and will have to spend a few billion Yuan to achieve it.
Everyone also thought Russia had a strong military yet look how that worked out
NATO is currently losing a conventional proxy war against it, that's how. Which only reinforces my point: there's zero reason to believe that either proxy or direct confrontation with China can be "won".
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