It’s not super clear whether from a racing perspective having an equal number of nukes is bad. I think it’s genuinely messy (and depends quite sensitively on how much actors are scared of losing vs. happy about winning vs. scared of racing).
Importantly though, once you have several thousand nukes the strategic returns to more nukes drop pretty close to zero, regardless of how many your opponents have, while if you get the scary model’s weights and then don’t use them to push capabilities even more, your opponent maybe gets a huge strategic advantage over you. I think this is probably true, but the important thing is whether the actors think it might be true.
In-general I think it’s very hard to predict whether people will overestimate or underestimate things. I agree that literally right now countries are probably underestimating it, but an overreaction in the future also wouldn’t surprise me very much (in the same way that COVID started with an underreaction, and then was followed by a massive overreaction).
Importantly though, once you have several thousand nukes the strategic returns to more nukes drop pretty close to zero, regardless of how many your opponents have, while if you get the scary model’s weights and then don’t use them to push capabilities even more, your opponent maybe gets a huge strategic advantage over you. I think this is probably true, but the important thing is whether the actors think it might be true.
Yeah, good point.