If you mean the Manhattan Project: no. IIUC there were basically zero Western groups and zero dollars working toward the bomb before that, so the Manhattan Project clearly sped things up. That’s not really a case of “centralization” so much as doing-the-thing-at-all vs not-doing-the-thing-at-all.
If you mean fusion: yes. There were many fusion projects in the sixties, people were learning quickly. Then the field centralized, and progress slowed to a crawl.
The current boom in fusion energy startups seems to have been set off by deep advances in material sciences (eg. magnets), electronics, manufacturing. These bottlenecks likely were the main reason fusion energy was not possible in the 60s. On priors it is more likely that centralisation was a result rather than a cause of fusion being hard.
On my understanding, the push for centralization came from a specific faction whose pitch was basically:
here’s the scaling laws for tokamaks
here’s how much money we’d need
… so let’s make one real big tokamak rather than spending money on lots of little research devices.
… and that faction mostly won the competition for government funding for about half a century.
The current boom accepted that faction’s story at face value, but then noticed that new materials allowed the same “scale up the tokamaks” strategy to be executed on a budget achievable with private funding, and therefore they could fund projects without having to fight the faction which won the battle for government funding.
The counterfactual which I think is probably correct is that there exist entirely different designs far superior to tokamaks, which don’t require that much scale in the first place, but which were never discovered because the “scale up the tokamaks” faction basically won the competition for funding and stopped most research on alternative designs from happening.
Bureaucracy. A centralised project would probably be more bureaucratic.
But you’re completely right that we frame this as a reason that centralisation might not increase the lead on China, and therefore framing it as a point against centralisation.
Whereas you’re presumably saying that slowing down progress would buy us more time to solve alignment, and so framing it as a significant point for centralisation.
I personally don’t favour bureaucracy that slows things down and reduce competence in a non-targeted way—I think competently prioritising work to reduce AI risk during the AI transition will be important. But I think your position is reasonable here
I think this is missing the most important consideration: centralization would likely massively slow down capabilities progress.
As a point of comparison—do you think the US nuclear programme was substantially slowed down because it was a centralized government programme?
If you mean the Manhattan Project: no. IIUC there were basically zero Western groups and zero dollars working toward the bomb before that, so the Manhattan Project clearly sped things up. That’s not really a case of “centralization” so much as doing-the-thing-at-all vs not-doing-the-thing-at-all.
If you mean fusion: yes. There were many fusion projects in the sixties, people were learning quickly. Then the field centralized, and progress slowed to a crawl.
The current boom in fusion energy startups seems to have been set off by deep advances in material sciences (eg. magnets), electronics, manufacturing. These bottlenecks likely were the main reason fusion energy was not possible in the 60s. On priors it is more likely that centralisation was a result rather than a cause of fusion being hard.
On my understanding, the push for centralization came from a specific faction whose pitch was basically:
here’s the scaling laws for tokamaks
here’s how much money we’d need
… so let’s make one real big tokamak rather than spending money on lots of little research devices.
… and that faction mostly won the competition for government funding for about half a century.
The current boom accepted that faction’s story at face value, but then noticed that new materials allowed the same “scale up the tokamaks” strategy to be executed on a budget achievable with private funding, and therefore they could fund projects without having to fight the faction which won the battle for government funding.
The counterfactual which I think is probably correct is that there exist entirely different designs far superior to tokamaks, which don’t require that much scale in the first place, but which were never discovered because the “scale up the tokamaks” faction basically won the competition for funding and stopped most research on alternative designs from happening.
Thanks! Great point.
We do say:
But you’re completely right that we frame this as a reason that centralisation might not increase the lead on China, and therefore framing it as a point against centralisation.
Whereas you’re presumably saying that slowing down progress would buy us more time to solve alignment, and so framing it as a significant point for centralisation.
I personally don’t favour bureaucracy that slows things down and reduce competence in a non-targeted way—I think competently prioritising work to reduce AI risk during the AI transition will be important. But I think your position is reasonable here