U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission pushes Manhattan Project-style AI initiative

[Phib]

https://​​x.com/​​hamandcheese/​​status/​​1858897287268725080

“The annual report of the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission is now live. 🚨

Its top recommendation is for Congress and the DoD to fund a Manhattan Project-like program to race to AGI.”

[Leon Lang]

How likely are such recommendations usually to be implemented? Are there already manifold markets on questions related to the recommendation?

[quila]

Are there already manifold markets

yes, but only small trading volume so far: https://​​manifold.markets/​​Bayesian/​​will-a-us-manhattanlike-project-for

[Milan W]

Note in particular that the Commission is recommending Congress to “Provide broad multiyear contracting authority to the executive branch and associated funding for leading artificial intelligence, cloud, and data center companies and others to advance the stated policy at a pace and scale consistent with the goal of U.S. AGI leadership”.

i.e. if these recommendations get implemented, pretty soon a big portion of the big 3 lab’s revenue will come from big government contracts. Look like a soft nationalization scenario to me.

[Milan W]

Upon further reflection: that big 3 lab soft nationalization scenario I speculated about will happen only if the recommendations end up being implemented with a minimum degree of competence. That is far from guaranteed to happen. Another possible implementation (which at this point I would not be all that surprised if it ended up happening) is “the Executive picks just one lab for some dumb political reason, hands them a ton of money under a vague contract, and then fails to provide any significant oversight”.

[Phib]

From Reuters:

“We’ve seen throughout history that countries that are first to exploit periods of rapid technological change can often cause shifts in the global balance of power,” Jacob Helberg, a USCC commissioner and senior advisor to software company Palantir’s CEO, told Reuters.

I think it is true that (setting aside AI risk concerns), the US gov should, the moment it recognizes AGI (smarter than human AI) is possible, pursue it. It’s the best use of resources, could lead to incredible economic/​productivity/​etc. growth, could lead to a decisive advantage over adversaries, could solve all sorts of problems.

“China is racing towards AGI … It’s critical that we take them extremely seriously,” Helberg added.

This does not seem true to me though, unless Helberg and all have additional evidence. From the Dwarkesh podcast recently, it seemed to me (to be reductionist) that both Gwern and SemiAnalysis doubted China was truly scaling/​AGI-pilled (yet). So this seems a bit more of a convenient statement from Helberg, and the next quote describes this commission as hawkish on China.

The USCC, established by Congress in 2000, provides annual recommendations on U.S.-China relations. Known for its hawkish policy proposals, the commission aims to guide lawmakers on issues of economic and strategic competition with China.

[Phib]

Realized I didn’t linkpost on lesswrong, only forum—link to Reuters:
https://​​www.reuters.com/​​technology/​​artificial-intelligence/​​us-government-commission-pushes-manhattan-project-style-ai-initiative-2024-11-19/​​

[quila]

link to the full report

(i ctrl+f’d “alignment” and there was not one mention of the AI sense)