Comment by paulhebert

2 days ago

It sure seems like it would be being built more slowly if these companies weren't pouring billions of dollars into building it as fast as possible.

That might give us more time to think through strategies for handling it as a society.

You can't simultaneously believe China is only ~6 months behind (true), and that US buildouts are vastly accelerating AI. If China is only a little bit behind, US labs halting changes nothing except puts the power in the hands of Chinese labs (realistically, the Chinese government)

  • China is 6 months behind because of distillation attacks, otherwise the gap would be larger

  • Yeah, the genie may be out of the bottle now. I wish we weren't in this situation and cooler heads had prevailed earlier on.

    I have serious concerns about how quickly this is accelerating and don't trust any of the major players (including Anthropic) to handle these concerns properly.

MY cynical take: Until the compute needs get so enormous that only governments can fund it and there is a consensus internationally, its either company A in country X or company B in country Y. And since everyone thinks THEY are the good guys the competition will continue.

  • You might be right. Just don't expect me to cheer on the arms dealers during the arms race.