Comment by heaney-555
14 hours ago
None of this works without buy-in from China. This isn't something private companies can decide. The US would need to sign a groundbreaking deal with China, equivalent to the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of the Cold War.
Dario does a good job of addressing that in this essay. He lists several potential levels of global agreements that could be beneficial to all parties. For example, having models capable of bioterrorism hurts both the US and its “adversaries”. It’s likely we could get global agreement that these capabilities benefit nobody.
I believe Dario has good intentions regarding global agreements. However, I find it difficult believing government’s public statements will match their private behaviors. I would bet that the US government is developing models with potentially devastating capabilities because they cannot guarantee that other countries won’t do the same. Maybe we’ll end up having something like mutually assured destruction with AI models similar to what we have today with nuclear weapons.
When I was reading this I was chuckling to myself imagining how China would be interpreting it as they read it. It was something like: Fuck you.
I hope China tells him to go kick rocks. From everything that has happened, they are the only ones carrying the torch for humanity that have led us to having some semblance of a healthy open-source/open-weight ecosystem.
No one in China is carrying on like headless chickens about the world ending, either. They're rational pragmatists, getting things done.
Nothing says "Let's make a deal" like constantly insisting we are Good and they are Evil.
In politics every single person playing the game is acutely aware of the rules. This is why talks are held behind closed doors so the rules can be suspended for a while.
We'd have to make a deal with China and be confident they wouldn't cheat on it.
And they would have to be confident that you wouldn't cheat on it.
That's not undecidable in principle - compute governance is a thing. The more likely sticking point is that the two sides might be soured on the deal once they realize how much oversight they'd have to give to the other side.
Would this be similar to the deal of "we'll offshore all our manufacturing to you and you'll become a free, open, liberal democracy with open borders and multiculturalism?" Because I remember how that deal turned out.
That last part was never important. Trading partners very rarely go to war. There just isn’t much in it for either party. Close cooperation and dependency is actually quite important here - liberal democracy or no.
With the admin we've got over here now, I think this comment is a little bit like the kettle calling the pot black, wouldn't you say?
Genuinely I don't believe China is the impediment here, I believe the current US administration is.