Maybe a tax on compute would be a good and feasible idea?
--Currently the AI community is mostly resource-poor academics struggling to compete with a minority of corporate researchers at places like DeepMind and OpenAI with huge compute budgets. So maybe the community would mostly support this tax, as it levels the playing field. The revenue from the tax could be earmarked to fund “AI for good” research projects. Perhaps we could package the tax with additional spending for such grants, so that overall money flows into the AI community, whilst reducing compute usage. This will hopefully make the proposal acceptable and therefore feasible.
--The tax could be set so that it is basically 0 for everything except for AI projects above a certain threshold of size, and then it’s prohibitive. To some extent this happens naturally since compute is normally measured on a log scale: If we have a tax that is 1000% of the cost of compute, this won’t be a big deal for academic researchers spending $100 or so per experiment (Oh no! Now I have to spend $1,000! No big deal, I’ll fill out an expense form and bill it to the university) but it would be prohibitive for a corporation trying to spend a billion dollars to make GPT-5. And the tax can also have a threshold such that only big-budget training runs get taxed at all, so that academics are completely untouched by the tax, as are small businesses, and big businesses making AI without the use of massive scale.
--The AI corporations and most of all the chip manufacturers would probably be against this. But maybe this opposition can be overcome.
Would this work across different countries (and if so how)? It seems like if one country implemented such a tax, the research groups in that country would be out-competed by research groups in other countries without such a tax (which seems worse than the status quo, since now the first AGI is likely to be created in a country that didn’t try to slow down AI progress or “level the playing field”).
Yeah, probably not. It would need to be an international agreement I guess. But this is true for lots of proposals. On the bright side, you could maybe tax the chip manufacturers instead of the AI projects? Idk.
Maybe one way it could be avoided is if it came packaged with loads of extra funding for safe AGI research, so that overall it is still cheapest to work from the US.
Another cool thing about this tax is that it would automatically counteract decreases in the cost of compute. Say we make the tax 10% of the current cost of compute. Then when the next generation of chips comes online, and the price drops by an order of magnitude, automatically the tax will be 100% of the cost. Then when the next generation comes online, the tax will be 1000%.
This means that we could make the tax basically nothing even for major corporations today, and only start to pinch them later.
Maybe a tax on compute would be a good and feasible idea?
--Currently the AI community is mostly resource-poor academics struggling to compete with a minority of corporate researchers at places like DeepMind and OpenAI with huge compute budgets. So maybe the community would mostly support this tax, as it levels the playing field. The revenue from the tax could be earmarked to fund “AI for good” research projects. Perhaps we could package the tax with additional spending for such grants, so that overall money flows into the AI community, whilst reducing compute usage. This will hopefully make the proposal acceptable and therefore feasible.
--The tax could be set so that it is basically 0 for everything except for AI projects above a certain threshold of size, and then it’s prohibitive. To some extent this happens naturally since compute is normally measured on a log scale: If we have a tax that is 1000% of the cost of compute, this won’t be a big deal for academic researchers spending $100 or so per experiment (Oh no! Now I have to spend $1,000! No big deal, I’ll fill out an expense form and bill it to the university) but it would be prohibitive for a corporation trying to spend a billion dollars to make GPT-5. And the tax can also have a threshold such that only big-budget training runs get taxed at all, so that academics are completely untouched by the tax, as are small businesses, and big businesses making AI without the use of massive scale.
--The AI corporations and most of all the chip manufacturers would probably be against this. But maybe this opposition can be overcome.
Would this work across different countries (and if so how)? It seems like if one country implemented such a tax, the research groups in that country would be out-competed by research groups in other countries without such a tax (which seems worse than the status quo, since now the first AGI is likely to be created in a country that didn’t try to slow down AI progress or “level the playing field”).
Yeah, probably not. It would need to be an international agreement I guess. But this is true for lots of proposals. On the bright side, you could maybe tax the chip manufacturers instead of the AI projects? Idk.
Maybe one way it could be avoided is if it came packaged with loads of extra funding for safe AGI research, so that overall it is still cheapest to work from the US.
Another cool thing about this tax is that it would automatically counteract decreases in the cost of compute. Say we make the tax 10% of the current cost of compute. Then when the next generation of chips comes online, and the price drops by an order of magnitude, automatically the tax will be 100% of the cost. Then when the next generation comes online, the tax will be 1000%.
This means that we could make the tax basically nothing even for major corporations today, and only start to pinch them later.