This seems wrong. Here’s an incomplete list of reasons why:
If the 3 leading labs join the moratorium and AGI is stealthily developed by the 4th, then the arrival of AGI will in fact have been slowed by the lead time of the first 3 labs + the slowdown that the 4th incurs by working in secret.
The point of this particular call for a 6-month moratorium is not to particularly slow down anyone (and as has been pointed out by others, it is possible that OpenAI wasn’t even planning to start training GPT-5 in the next few months). Rather, the point is to form a coalition to support future policies, e.g. a government-supported moratorium.
It is actually fairly hard to build compute clusters in secret, because you can just track what comes out of the chip fabs and where it goes
This seems wrong. Here’s an incomplete list of reasons why:
If the 3 leading labs join the moratorium and AGI is stealthily developed by the 4th, then the arrival of AGI will in fact have been slowed by the lead time of the first 3 labs + the slowdown that the 4th incurs by working in secret.
The point of this particular call for a 6-month moratorium is not to particularly slow down anyone (and as has been pointed out by others, it is possible that OpenAI wasn’t even planning to start training GPT-5 in the next few months). Rather, the point is to form a coalition to support future policies, e.g. a government-supported moratorium.
It is actually fairly hard to build compute clusters in secret, because you can just track what comes out of the chip fabs and where it goes
While not straightforward, it’s also feasible to monitor existing clusters, see e.g. https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.11341