“If China can’t get millions of chips, we’ll (at least temporarily) live in a unipolar world, where only the US and its allies have these models.
It’s unclear whether the unipolar world will last, but there’s at least the possibility that, because AI systems can eventually help make even smarter AI systems, a temporary lead could be parlayed into a durable advantage.
Thus, in this world, the US and its allies might take a commanding and long-lasting lead on the global stage.
Well-enforced export controls are the only thing that can prevent China from getting millions of chips, and are therefore the most important determinant of whether we end up in a unipolar or bipolar world.”
From Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s latest piece, On DeepSeek and Export Controls.
I am a fool—what does RSI mean in this case? I couldn’t find it in the og post.
Recursive self improvement
Not surprised, given China’s announcement of a $145 billion dollar AI fund next week, and a potential $1 trillion in more funding by February or March.
If the $1 trillion dollar commitment is real, I have to give a lot of Bayes points to those who predicted an AI race, because this is not a thing you do unless you either want the technology for yourself, or you are racing against someone:
https://x.com/AndrewCurran_/status/1883721802280841245
https://x.com/angelusm0rt1s/status/1883796706107736126
Seems like the only thing that could stop the train at this point is a few tens or hundreds of millions of deaths from out of control AI. Doesn’t seem like anyone in government wants to cooperate to reduce the risk of everyone dying. Both the US and China have individually decided to roll the dice on creating machines they don’t understand and may not be able to control.
I think an accident that caused a million deaths would do it.
I hope it would, but I actually think it would depend on who or what killed whom, how, and whether it was really an accident at all.
If an American-made AI hacked the DOD and nuked Milan because someone asked it to find a way to get the 2026 Olympics moved, then I agree, we would probably get a push back against race incentives.
If a Chinese-made AI killed millions in Taiwan in an effort create an opportunity for China to seize control, that could possibly *accelerate* race dynamics.
Previous ballpark numbers I’ve heard floated around are “100,000 deaths to shut it all down” but I expect the threshold will grow as more money is involved. Depends on how dramatic the deaths are though, 3000 deaths was enough to cause the US to invade two countries back in the 2000s. 100,000 deaths is thirty-three 9/11s.
I think the response to 9/11 was an outlier mostly caused by the “photogenic” nature of the disaster. COVID killed over a million Americans yet we basically forgot about it once it was gone. We haven’t seen much serious investment in measures to prevent a new pandemic.
Yeah, I hate to be the one to say it but… you’d be better off calculating the size of the incident in terms of government response by summing the net worth / socioeconomic power of the harmed individuals.
That’s part of what I was trying to get at with “dramatic” but I agree now that it might be 80% photogenicity. I do expect that 3000 Americans killed by (a) humanoid robot(s) on camera would cause more outrage than 1 million Americans killed by a virus which we discovered six months later was AI-created in some way.