Hm, my prior is that speed of learning how stolen code works would scale along with general innovation speed, though I haven’t thought about it a lot. On the one hand, learning the basics of how the code works would scale well with more automated testing, and a lot of finetuning could presumably be automated without intimate knowledge. On the other hand, we might be in a paradigm where AI tech allows us to generate lots of architectures to test, anyway, and the bottleneck is for engineers to develop an intuition for them, which seems like the thing that you’re pointing at.
I think this this points to the strategic supremacy of relevant infrastructure in these scenarios. From what I remember of the battleship era, having an advantage in design didn’t seem to be a particularly large advantage—once a new era was entered, everyone with sufficient infrastructure switches to the new technology and an arms race starts from scratch.
This feels similar to the AI scenario, where technology seems likely to spread quickly through a combination of high financial incentive, interconnected social networks, state-sponsored espionage etc. The way in which a serious differential emerges is likely to be more through a gap in the infrastructure to implement the new technology. It seems that the current world is tilted towards infrastructure ability diffusing fast enough to, but it seems possible that if we have a massive increase in economic growth then this balance is altered and infrastructure gaps emerge, creating differentials that can’t easily be reversed by a few algorithm leaks.
Hm, my prior is that speed of learning how stolen code works would scale along with general innovation speed, though I haven’t thought about it a lot. On the one hand, learning the basics of how the code works would scale well with more automated testing, and a lot of finetuning could presumably be automated without intimate knowledge. On the other hand, we might be in a paradigm where AI tech allows us to generate lots of architectures to test, anyway, and the bottleneck is for engineers to develop an intuition for them, which seems like the thing that you’re pointing at.
I think this this points to the strategic supremacy of relevant infrastructure in these scenarios. From what I remember of the battleship era, having an advantage in design didn’t seem to be a particularly large advantage—once a new era was entered, everyone with sufficient infrastructure switches to the new technology and an arms race starts from scratch.
This feels similar to the AI scenario, where technology seems likely to spread quickly through a combination of high financial incentive, interconnected social networks, state-sponsored espionage etc. The way in which a serious differential emerges is likely to be more through a gap in the infrastructure to implement the new technology. It seems that the current world is tilted towards infrastructure ability diffusing fast enough to, but it seems possible that if we have a massive increase in economic growth then this balance is altered and infrastructure gaps emerge, creating differentials that can’t easily be reversed by a few algorithm leaks.
Yeah, I think the engineer intuition is the bottleneck I’m pointing at here.