This argument is important because it is related to a critical assumption in AGI x-risk, specifically with regard to the effectiveness of regulation.
If an AGI can be created by any person, in their living room, with a 10 year old laptop, then regulation is going to struggle to make a difference. Case in point: strong encryption was made illegal (and still is) in various places, and yet, teenagers use Signal and the internet runs on HTTPS.
If, on the other hand, true agent-like AGI turns out to be computationally expensive and requires very specialized hardware to run efficiently, such that only very large corporations can foot the bill to do so (e.g. designing and building increasingly custom hardware like Google TPUs, Nvidia JETSON, Cerebras Wafer, Microsoft / Graphcore IPU, Mythic AMP), then regulation is going to be surprisingly effective, in the same way that it has become stupidly difficult to build new nuclear reactors in the United States, despite advances in safety / efficiency / etc.
This argument is important because it is related to a critical assumption in AGI x-risk, specifically with regard to the effectiveness of regulation.
If an AGI can be created by any person, in their living room, with a 10 year old laptop, then regulation is going to struggle to make a difference. Case in point: strong encryption was made illegal (and still is) in various places, and yet, teenagers use Signal and the internet runs on HTTPS.
If, on the other hand, true agent-like AGI turns out to be computationally expensive and requires very specialized hardware to run efficiently, such that only very large corporations can foot the bill to do so (e.g. designing and building increasingly custom hardware like Google TPUs, Nvidia JETSON, Cerebras Wafer, Microsoft / Graphcore IPU, Mythic AMP), then regulation is going to be surprisingly effective, in the same way that it has become stupidly difficult to build new nuclear reactors in the United States, despite advances in safety / efficiency / etc.