Comment by m_ke
1 month ago
Yeah some real main character energy from Dario as usual.
I'll never get why he thinks China would just sit there and let the US dominate them in AI when all it would take is a few of their boats blockading Taiwan to put a stop to it all.
This Onion meme is perfect; you could easily replace Sam with Dario: https://theonion.com/sam-altman-if-i-dont-end-the-world-some...
You don’t need to replace them. Dario is the “someone” in question.
What exactly happens to a "losing" country when it has been AI "dominated"?
You already have examples. Venezuela, Iran, Ukraine, Libya… maybe Japan? The list is sort of long. Juxtapose or something.
And here I was thinking that all of those had nothing to do with AI.
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Why is the US so scared of this fate? To the rest of the world, they're tecnofeudalist monopolists.
or you can image, what exactly happens to a "losing" country when it has been a small clique "dominated"?
Saying "all it would take" and then describing an act of war is an interesting opinion.
wouldn't stop AI companies from continuing to develop using their current infrastructure.
the West could retaliate by halting shipments of photoresist and other materials to China.
meanwhile, Intel second-sources Nvidia and starts pumping out GPUs.
the economic fallout would be devastating as trade wars and export bans on both sides make Trump's "Liberation Day" tariffs look like NAFTA.
The rest of the world would likely side with China. The export ban on Fable wasn’t even extended to five eyes countries.
US is going to find itself isolated and irrelevant. And not a moment too soon.
I do wonder what the world will look like under a chinese hegemony though...
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> the West could retaliate by halting shipments of
China quickly retaliated last time by stopping shipments of rare earths and magnets. The West has no answer for this, really up the river without a paddle for such critical supply chain elements.
China controls way more things, from medical needles to pharmaceutical ingredient.
Lots of them can be made in the west or west friendly countries, but that takes time, money, infrastructure and good execution. Yes, identical to what is covered in China's belt and road initiatives. See the gap now?
I was led to believe that the US does have internal sources of these, but they are largely undeveloped. For years the processing could not economically compete with China so shutdown.
Which is to say, given internal subsidies, the US could eventually produce some on its own.
Unless I misunderstood the situation.
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China would just start buying oil again, and stop using it from their strategic reserve. Hello $200 barrels of oil.
Dario is more of a threat to the US, in terms of advancements in AI, than China. In Dario's mind anything that can't be controlled competitively is a threat to Anthropic, so he positions his FUD strawman so that Dario doesn't have to worry about the competition. And then he can artificially inflate token costs so his IPO can happen. Dario doesn't actually care about ethics, alignment or availability of LLMs - he just likes to use those words to sound like he does. Yet we've all seen how Anthropic actually acts vs what they say.
The scary part very few are talking about is that every compute device is Turing complete. So everything from the phone in your pocket to a DGX Spark is a threat to national security now since, technically, every device can run any model (how well is not a question of concern when you start to argue hardware should be gated just the same as Dario likes to gate models). I mean, along these lines of thinking Linux should not be available to the masses! What if someone runs some code that's not approved by the benevolent dictator for life, Dario? People will say: that can't happen, but the reality is it already is. If everyone has reasonable access to compute to run models that are mostly capable comparative to burning Anthropic tokens, why wouldn't they? It's risk reduction and price protection. Yet we can't buy those systems because of future production already being purchased by these organizations.
But back to the models themselves... We played this game with Metasploit back in the day: many who had no clue claimed exploit tools should be regulated and only available for use by those blessed, illegal elsewhere (I believe the closest this got was the Wassenaar delegation in the US, but only through collateral inclusion of "cyber weapons "). Except in that timeframe the authors of these tools weren't advocating for protection. Today the world is fine, systems improved because of security FOSS tooling. The same thing will happen with LLMs. Unless, that is, Dario gets his way. I'm not a fan of Altman but I think he's standing back watching this play out knowing what Dario is doing: either he succeeds and OAI benefits or Dario ends up the Chicken Little of AI and Anthropic fails to launch (their IPO).
The reality is Dario is only doing this because this is a real risk to his business. China's constraints in building competitively have given them an advantage: they are doing more with less. And if you think that their distilling from US models was in any way anti-competitive or illegal, then I guess maybe "deal with it", much akin to Anthropic, Google and OAI's response around taking the (copyright) content in the first place with no repercussions.
People who don't work in the AI bubble don't care at all about any of these people. They could all be gone overnight and the world would continue to innovate, probably in a much more productive manner, without them.
> And if you think that their distilling from US models was in any way anti-competitive or illegal, then I guess maybe "deal with it", much akin to Anthropic, Google and OAI's response around taking the (copyright) content in the first place with no repercussions.
Exactly. The cries in favor of distillation regulation from the US AI companies ring hollow and fearful.
OpenAI and Anthropic didn't realize that distillation was going to be so (a) effective and (b) un-technically-stoppable at scale.
Now they're seeing their IPOs at risk and clutching at governmental straws.
Dario's argument is transparently working backwards from {protect Anthropic's economic model} <- {need government regulation} <- {justify government regulation via AI fears} <- {we love open models, but so sorry they can't pass regulation}.
If the rise of the web in the 90s taught us anything, it should have been that companies that take economic reality as it exists thrive, while those that predicate their value on regulation fail.
If distillation at scale works and is technically feasible? That's reality. Deal with it.
11 carriers are not just for show.
Could have fooled me, judging by the Iran and Yemen performance.
Iran showed us that they apparently are.
Don't confuse political limitations and lack of a theory of victory with the inability to achieve a goal. A blockade needs ships those ships can be destroyed.