Fwiw, my own position is that for both infosec and racing it’s the brute fact that USG see fits to centralise all resources and develop AGI asap that would cause China to 1) try much harder to steal the weights than when private companies had developed the same capabilities themselves, 2) try much harder to race to AGI themselves.
So the argument here is either that China is more responsive to “social proof” of the importance of AI (rather than observations of AI capabilities), or that China wants to compete with USG for competition’s sake (e.g. showing they are as good as or better than USG)? I agree this is plausible.
It’s a bit weird to me to call this an “incentive”, since both of these arguments don’t seem to be making any sort of appeal to rational self-interest on China’s part. Maybe change it to “motivation”? I think that would have been clearer to me.
(Btw, you seem to be assuming that the core reason for centralization will be “beat China”, but it could also be “make this technology safe”. Presumably this would make a difference to this point as well as others in the post.)
I agree that centralising to make AI safe would make a difference. It seems a lot less likely to me than centralising to beat China (there’s already loads of beat China rhetoric, and it doesn’t seem very likely to go away).
Fwiw, my own position is that for both infosec and racing it’s the brute fact that USG see fits to centralise all resources and develop AGI asap that would cause China to 1) try much harder to steal the weights than when private companies had developed the same capabilities themselves, 2) try much harder to race to AGI themselves.
So the argument here is either that China is more responsive to “social proof” of the importance of AI (rather than observations of AI capabilities), or that China wants to compete with USG for competition’s sake (e.g. showing they are as good as or better than USG)? I agree this is plausible.
It’s a bit weird to me to call this an “incentive”, since both of these arguments don’t seem to be making any sort of appeal to rational self-interest on China’s part. Maybe change it to “motivation”? I think that would have been clearer to me.
(Btw, you seem to be assuming that the core reason for centralization will be “beat China”, but it could also be “make this technology safe”. Presumably this would make a difference to this point as well as others in the post.)
Changed to motivation, thanks for the suggestion.
I agree that centralising to make AI safe would make a difference. It seems a lot less likely to me than centralising to beat China (there’s already loads of beat China rhetoric, and it doesn’t seem very likely to go away).