Comment by mococa

13 hours ago

China will not slow down.

This. There's no slowing down whatsoever. If the US slows down AI development, China will just leapfrog them, which they're getting close to doing. The US AI companies saying they need to slow down is just PR nonsense.

  • The US companies talking about “pacing” aren't actually talking about slowing down their own development efforts, they are talking about slowing down competition. That is, specifically, they are seeking to have government, on the pretext of “safety”:

    (1) Give the big AI incumbents an anti-trust exemption so the they can coordinate without it being an illegal agreement not to compete, and

    (2) Adopt mandatory supervision (by giving priveleged access to monitors) to the shared safety protocols of the big labs, by a nonprofit funded by the big labs, of everyone training, distributing, or hosting models.

    (3) Adopt a policy of seeking international agreements to extend substantially the same rules to foreign actors training, distributing, and hosting models.

    The part they are doing voluntarily isn't to promote the lobbying effort for these mandates isn't slowing down, it is giving their pet nonprofit the access for “independwht supervision” of their own operations to their own existing safety rules.

    • I've seen two theories as to what's going on. One is the theory you've espoused, that AI companies are trying to do regulatory capture. The other theory is that they're starting to worry about running out of cash, so they want to do a Washington Naval Treaty-style pause to lower the amount of money they have to shovel at model development to stay competitive.

      These theories aren't entirely incompatible with each other, so both could be true at the same time.

      2 replies →

  • There is no moat with this stuff. There's no reason to be concerned about being leapfrogged.

  • And yet we all have failed to die so far from nuclear holocaust, despite Russia being our dire enemy, because of a system of agreed controls and limits between even nations that hate each other.

    • I don't think the agreements played any important role outside of limiting tests. I highly doubt agreements about nukes in particular have meaningfully curbed risks of their use. MAD has played a much larger role in that, and MAD is kind of the antithesis of control agreements, it is the natural equilibrium in the game.

facts, imagine trying to get them to slow down their progress on AI, my question is are they are serious threat like is there actually an AI race between China and the US. Perhaps it's an excuse to spend more on the military and also to enrich these AI firms. Perhaps I'm blowing things out of proportion.

It's not about China doing their own thing. It's about US companies using Chinese AI. That will definitely slow down if legislation that criminalizes open source passes.

So, it's about competition inside the US market, with strong indications of an impeding losing scenario on raw economics (it has nothing to do with AGI, just price).

There is a way they could. In mind only thing that will slow down the frontier is government taking control of the revenue.

So my proposal is AI companies decide which labs have come close to frontier and decide to slow it. Government decide to stop progress in that and they divide the revenue from all labs(for say 10 years), without any matter of where it is coming from. Any lab which reaches close to frontier gets a chunk in the pie. This will encourage labs to come close to the frontier but not dangerously close.