I don’t think it’s a binary; they could still pay less attention!
(plausibly there’s a bazillion things constantly trying to grab their attention, so they won’t “lock on” if we avoid bringing AI to their attention too much)
to clarify: governments have already put some of their agentic capability towards figuring out the most powerful ways to use ai, and there is plenty of documentation already as to what those are. the documentation is the fuel, and it has already caught on “being used to design war devices” fire.
the question is how do they respond. it’s not likely they’ll respond well, regardless, of course. I’m more worried about pause regulation itself changing the landscape in a way that causes net acceleration, rather than advocacy for it independent of the enactment of the regulation, which I expect to do relatively little. individual human words mean little next to the might of “hey chatgpt,” suddenly being a thing that exists.
I don’t think governments have yet committed to trying to train their own state of the art foundation models for military purposes, probably partly because they (sensibly) guess that they would not be able to keep up with the private sector. That means that government interest/involvement has relatively little effect on the pace of advancement of the bleeding edge.
I don’t think it’s a binary; they could still pay less attention!
(plausibly there’s a bazillion things constantly trying to grab their attention, so they won’t “lock on” if we avoid bringing AI to their attention too much)
to clarify: governments have already put some of their agentic capability towards figuring out the most powerful ways to use ai, and there is plenty of documentation already as to what those are. the documentation is the fuel, and it has already caught on “being used to design war devices” fire.
the question is how do they respond. it’s not likely they’ll respond well, regardless, of course. I’m more worried about pause regulation itself changing the landscape in a way that causes net acceleration, rather than advocacy for it independent of the enactment of the regulation, which I expect to do relatively little. individual human words mean little next to the might of “hey chatgpt,” suddenly being a thing that exists.
I don’t think governments have yet committed to trying to train their own state of the art foundation models for military purposes, probably partly because they (sensibly) guess that they would not be able to keep up with the private sector. That means that government interest/involvement has relatively little effect on the pace of advancement of the bleeding edge.