I agree that if you put enough of these together, there are probably ~10 actors that can scrape together >200T tokens. This is important for coordination; it means the number of organizations that can play at this level will be heavily bottlenecked, potentially for years (until a bunch more data can be generated, which won’t be free). It seems to me that these ~10 actors are large highly-legible entities that are already well-known to the US or Chinese governments. This could be a meaningful lever for mitigating the race-dynamic fear that “even if we don’t do it, someone else will”, reducing everything to a 2 party US-China negotiation.
The big problem is the cold war mentality is back, and both sides will compete a lot more rather than cooperate. Combine this with a bit of an arms race by China and the US, and the chances for cooperation on existential risk are remote.
This is a separate discussion, but it is important to point out that the literal Cold War had the opposing powers cooperate on existential risk reduction. Granted that before that, two cities were burned to ash and we played apocalypse chicken in Cuba.
I agree that if you put enough of these together, there are probably ~10 actors that can scrape together >200T tokens. This is important for coordination; it means the number of organizations that can play at this level will be heavily bottlenecked, potentially for years (until a bunch more data can be generated, which won’t be free). It seems to me that these ~10 actors are large highly-legible entities that are already well-known to the US or Chinese governments. This could be a meaningful lever for mitigating the race-dynamic fear that “even if we don’t do it, someone else will”, reducing everything to a 2 party US-China negotiation.
The big problem is the cold war mentality is back, and both sides will compete a lot more rather than cooperate. Combine this with a bit of an arms race by China and the US, and the chances for cooperation on existential risk are remote.
This is a separate discussion, but it is important to point out that the literal Cold War had the opposing powers cooperate on existential risk reduction. Granted that before that, two cities were burned to ash and we played apocalypse chicken in Cuba.