News of the new models percolates slowly through the US government and beyond.
Well fleshed out scenario, but this kind of assumption is always a dealbreaker for me.
Why would the government not be aware of the development of the mightiest technology and weapon ever created if “we” are aware of it?
Could you please elaborate why you choose to go for the “stupid and uninformed government”, instead of the more plausible scenario where the government actually knows exactly what is going on in every step of the process and is the driving force behind it?
Large institutions are super slow to change, and usually many years behind the technological frontier. It seems to me like the burden of proof is very obviously on your perspective. For instance, US policy only acted large-scale on Covid after we were already far along the exponential. That should be a dealbreaker for this being your dealbreaker.
Also, there is no single entity called “the government”; individuals can be more or less aware of stuff, but that doesn’t mean the larger entity acts with something resembling awareness. Or cohesion, for that matter.
Yes, sometimes they are slow, other times they are fast. A private effort to build a nuke or go to the moon in the time frames they did would not have been possible. AFAIK the assumption that Chinese AI development is government directed everyone agrees to, but for some very strange reason people like to think that US AI is directed by a group of quirky nerds that wants to save the world and just happens to get their hands on a MASSIVE amount of compute (worth billions upon billions of dollars). Imagine when the government gets to hear what these nerds are up to in a couple of years...
IF there is any truth to how important the race to AGI/ASI is to win.
THEN governments are the key-players in those races.
Well fleshed out scenario, but this kind of assumption is always a dealbreaker for me.
Why would the government not be aware of the development of the mightiest technology and weapon ever created if “we” are aware of it?
Could you please elaborate why you choose to go for the “stupid and uninformed government”, instead of the more plausible scenario where the government actually knows exactly what is going on in every step of the process and is the driving force behind it?
Large institutions are super slow to change, and usually many years behind the technological frontier. It seems to me like the burden of proof is very obviously on your perspective. For instance, US policy only acted large-scale on Covid after we were already far along the exponential. That should be a dealbreaker for this being your dealbreaker.
Also, there is no single entity called “the government”; individuals can be more or less aware of stuff, but that doesn’t mean the larger entity acts with something resembling awareness. Or cohesion, for that matter.
Yes, sometimes they are slow, other times they are fast. A private effort to build a nuke or go to the moon in the time frames they did would not have been possible. AFAIK the assumption that Chinese AI development is government directed everyone agrees to, but for some very strange reason people like to think that US AI is directed by a group of quirky nerds that wants to save the world and just happens to get their hands on a MASSIVE amount of compute (worth billions upon billions of dollars). Imagine when the government gets to hear what these nerds are up to in a couple of years...
IF there is any truth to how important the race to AGI/ASI is to win.
THEN governments are the key-players in those races.