Thanks, I expect you’re right that there’s some confusion in my thinking here.
Haven’t got to the bottom of it yet, but on more incentive to steal the weights: - partly I’m reasoning in the way that you guess, more resources → more capabilities → more incentives - I’m also thinking “stronger signal that the US is all in and thinks this is really important → raises p(China should also be all in) from a Chinese perspective → more likely China invests hard in stealing the weights” - these aren’t independent lines of reasoning, as the stronger signal is sent by spending more resources - but I tentatively think that it’s not the case that at a fixed capability level the incentives to steal the weights are the same. I think they’d be higher with a centralised project, as conditional on a centralised project there’s more reason for China to believe a) AGI is the one thing that matters, b) the US is out to dominate
Thanks, I expect you’re right that there’s some confusion in my thinking here.
Haven’t got to the bottom of it yet, but on more incentive to steal the weights:
- partly I’m reasoning in the way that you guess, more resources → more capabilities → more incentives
- I’m also thinking “stronger signal that the US is all in and thinks this is really important → raises p(China should also be all in) from a Chinese perspective → more likely China invests hard in stealing the weights”
- these aren’t independent lines of reasoning, as the stronger signal is sent by spending more resources
- but I tentatively think that it’s not the case that at a fixed capability level the incentives to steal the weights are the same. I think they’d be higher with a centralised project, as conditional on a centralised project there’s more reason for China to believe a) AGI is the one thing that matters, b) the US is out to dominate
(Replied to Tom above)