Yes, yes. Probably not. And they already have a Sora clone called Vidu, for heaven’s sake.
We spend all this time debating: should greedy companies be in control, should government intervene, will intervention slow progress to the good stuff: cancer cures, longevity, etc. All of these arguments assume that WE (which I read as a gloss for the West) will have some say in the use of AGI. If the PRC gets it, and it is as powerful as predicted, these arguments become academic. And this is not because the Chinese are malevolent. It’s because, AGI would fall into the hands of the CCP via their civil-military fusion. This is a far more calculating group than those in Western governments. Here officials have to worry about getting through the next election. There, they can more comfortably wield AGI for their ends while worrying less about palatability of the means: observe how the population quietly endured a draconian lock-down and only meekly revolted when conditions began to deteriorate and containment looked futile.
I am not an accelerationist. But I am a get-it-before-them-ist. Whether the West (which I count as including Korea and Japan and Taiwan) can maintain our edge is an open question. A country that churns out PhDs and loves AI will not be easily thwarted.
And they already have a Sora clone called Vidu, for heaven’s sake.
No, they don’t. They have a video generation model, which is one of a great many published over the past few years as image generation increasingly became solved, such as Imagen Video or Phenaki from Google years ago, and the Vidu samples are clearly inferior to Sora (despite heavy emphasis on the ‘pan over static scene’ easy niche): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1R-jxDPC70
Here we are in 2024, and we’re still being told how Real Soon Now Chinese DL will crush Westerners. I’ve been hearing this for almost a decade now, and I’ve stopped being impressed by the likes of Hsu talking about how “China graduates a million engineers a year!” or whatever. Somehow, the Next Big Thing never comes out of Chinese DL, no matter how many papers or citations or patents they have each year. Something to think about.
(I also have an ongoing Twitter series where every half year or so, I tweet a few of the frontier-pushing Western DL achievements, and I ask for merely 3 Chinese things as good—not better, just plausibly as good, including in retrospect from previous years. You know how many actual legitimate answers I’ve gotten? Like 1. Somehow, all the e/accs and China hawks like Alexandr Wang can’t seem to think of even a single one which was at or past the frontier, as opposed to the latest shiny ‘catches up to GPT-4!* * [on narrow benchmarks, YMMV]’ clone model.)
Quantify how much worse the PRC getting AGI would be than OpenAI getting it, or the US government, and how much existential risk there is from not pausing/pausing, or from the PRC/OpenAI/the US government building AGI first, and then calculating whether pausing to do {alignment research, diplomacy, sabotage, espionage} is higher expected value than moving ahead.
(Is China getting AGI first half the value of the US getting it first, or 10%, or 90%?)
The discussion over pause or competition around AGI has been lacking this so far. Maybe I should write such an analysis.
Yes, yes. Probably not. And they already have a Sora clone called Vidu, for heaven’s sake.
We spend all this time debating: should greedy companies be in control, should government intervene, will intervention slow progress to the good stuff: cancer cures, longevity, etc. All of these arguments assume that WE (which I read as a gloss for the West) will have some say in the use of AGI. If the PRC gets it, and it is as powerful as predicted, these arguments become academic. And this is not because the Chinese are malevolent. It’s because, AGI would fall into the hands of the CCP via their civil-military fusion. This is a far more calculating group than those in Western governments. Here officials have to worry about getting through the next election. There, they can more comfortably wield AGI for their ends while worrying less about palatability of the means: observe how the population quietly endured a draconian lock-down and only meekly revolted when conditions began to deteriorate and containment looked futile.
I am not an accelerationist. But I am a get-it-before-them-ist. Whether the West (which I count as including Korea and Japan and Taiwan) can maintain our edge is an open question. A country that churns out PhDs and loves AI will not be easily thwarted.
No, they don’t. They have a video generation model, which is one of a great many published over the past few years as image generation increasingly became solved, such as Imagen Video or Phenaki from Google years ago, and the Vidu samples are clearly inferior to Sora (despite heavy emphasis on the ‘pan over static scene’ easy niche): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1R-jxDPC70
Here we are in 2024, and we’re still being told how Real Soon Now Chinese DL will crush Westerners. I’ve been hearing this for almost a decade now, and I’ve stopped being impressed by the likes of Hsu talking about how “China graduates a million engineers a year!” or whatever. Somehow, the Next Big Thing never comes out of Chinese DL, no matter how many papers or citations or patents they have each year. Something to think about.
(I also have an ongoing Twitter series where every half year or so, I tweet a few of the frontier-pushing Western DL achievements, and I ask for merely 3 Chinese things as good—not better, just plausibly as good, including in retrospect from previous years. You know how many actual legitimate answers I’ve gotten? Like 1. Somehow, all the e/accs and China hawks like Alexandr Wang can’t seem to think of even a single one which was at or past the frontier, as opposed to the latest shiny ‘catches up to GPT-4!* * [on narrow benchmarks, YMMV]’ clone model.)
The standard way of dealing with this:
Quantify how much worse the PRC getting AGI would be than OpenAI getting it, or the US government, and how much existential risk there is from not pausing/pausing, or from the PRC/OpenAI/the US government building AGI first, and then calculating whether pausing to do {alignment research, diplomacy, sabotage, espionage} is higher expected value than moving ahead.
(Is China getting AGI first half the value of the US getting it first, or 10%, or 90%?)
The discussion over pause or competition around AGI has been lacking this so far. Maybe I should write such an analysis.
Gentlemen, calculemus!