DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
Tell me about it.
User ID: 745
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
11hr ago
They are risk-averse and they are not very imaginative. They avoid risks like, idk, Malacca blockade, but aren't distracted by pie-in-the-sky stories of Mythos-6.7 plowing through their infrastructure, to say nothing of nanobot swarms. They also aren't really that hostile to the US, and do not assign great importance to policies of US companies; their issue with Anthropic is that the USG tolerates this unhinged posture.
There may even be a tragic effect where successes of Chinese companies under compute constraints convince the Party that whining about compute is disingenuous and brilliant Chinese minds adept in mafs will outperform the capitalists regardless, so they don't take Trump's olive branch in the form of limited Nvidia sales either.
Zhipu has an easy time recruiting from Tsinghua on their own. As things stand, China will have to hope that this is enough.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
17hr ago
We don't have a lot of data points for costs. But for what it's worth, V4-Pro-Preview scored 44 on Artificial Analysis. Semianalysis says of Korean Motif:
Motif is a sub 30 person startup that released their first pre-trained model, which was only 2.6B total parameters, last June. They’ve raised just $17M and have access to a mere 768 B200s (< 2MW).
They have reached 47 with Motif 3. Its pretraining budget is ≈10x below V4 (given active parameters x tokens). It's definitely doable to train something like V4 for under $30M. I mainly hedge because of apparent troubles DeepSeek had with Huawei.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
18hr ago
but if compute costs really are dropping it stands to reason that developing new models will be cheaper in the future, not more expensive...right?
Compute costs are arguably not even falling, as the utility of compute is rising. See memory price hikes per GB, on the same process.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
18hr ago
DeepSeek's costs are also... probably not comparable. They say about 6m for DeepSeek v4, and it's probably not a lie, but it depends on a training architecture built for specialized silicon that you or I can't get, and highly optimized decisions about power costs
They don't, you mean V3. V4 is $17-30M. Also, what they specifically said then (and everyone was eager to first misquote them and then accuse them of lying) was:
Lastly, we emphasize again the economical training costs of DeepSeek-V3, summarized in Table 1, achieved through our optimized co-design of algorithms, frameworks, and hardware. During the pre-training stage, training DeepSeek-V3 on each trillion tokens requires only 180K H800 GPU hours, i.e., 3.7 days on our cluster with 2048 H800 GPUs. Consequently, our pretraining stage is completed in less than two months and costs 2664K GPU hours. Combined with 119K GPU hours for the context length extension and 5K GPU hours for post-training, DeepSeek-V3 costs only 2.788M GPU hours for its full training. Assuming the rental price of the H800 GPU is $2 per GPU hour, our total training costs amount to only $5.576M. Note that the aforementioned costs include only the official training of DeepSeek-V3, excluding the costs associated with prior research and ablation experiments on architectures, algorithms, or data.
R1 was additional $280K or so, according to a later paper. Current RL runs are much more expensive.
Anyway you're correct on the core point that this isn't a game for small actors. Tens of millions in GPU-hours is just the entry fee.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
18hr ago
You can't do anything underground without first moving mass above-ground (unless you find some convenient caves I guess). Excavations are also detectable seismically, and there will be chemical and thermal signatures for large scale projects. You likely won't hide gigawatts of compute under the mountains. In a world chock full with sensors integrated into AI data processing, it's hard to hide anything significant.
Their thesis is not unworkable.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
19hr ago
These are not the views of a man with opinions on geopolitics, they are the views of a man without them.
I take it that you struggle to imagine a very intelligent man (and Dario is extremely intelligent) with political views you consider midwitted. But why? For me, this sounds completely natural. Plenty of luminaries have normie beliefs. Von Neumann was a cookie cutter hawk, many of his peers were naive pro-Soviet useful idiots. And as Pelevin has observed, America is a land of intellectuals, not intelligentsia; white collar professionals are cogs in a well-oiled economic machine, they have their caste specializations, it's cringe and inappropriate for an AGI lab CEO to seek out some contrarian cesspit to have his reddit tier opinions on le CCP challenged. He's read Fukuyama, Pinker and, with some luck in the airport, Yuval Noah Harari, and he can already be proud of his erudition and the ability to carve out time for such intellectual explorations; maybe he vaguely "knows" that 1984 is a criticism of Chinese Authoritarianism; perhaps he follows Noah Smith and Ezra Klein to keep abreast of the cutting-edge discourse; Yglesias, Hanania, Scott would already be veering into a weird, dangerous, confusing territory. If he were to deviate even more, who should he listen to instead, me? (For the record, Dario doesn't follow me on X, though he doesn't follow anybody). Tooze, maybe? Tooze is a dirty sellout traitor.
Further, rationalists generally have shit taste and little interest in the object level reality, their intuitions about the world are based on popular media franchises. Dario is at least sophisticated enough to cite Fukuyama instead of Star Wars and Harry Potter.
More importantly, why do you even think that his views are illegitimate? What specifically is wrong in what he says? Why must he add some personal quirky flourish on it? Liberalism is a coherent philosophy of the winners of history, and Fukuyama is a prophet for his civilization. Gwern of all people thinks very highly of him.:
I’ve bumped this to 4 stars as, thinking back on the ~decade since I read this, Fukuyama is still right and yet no one seems to get this.
People, look at the Arab Spring. Did it yield any caliphates, say? Anarchistic self-governing communes? Self-governing city-states? Hanseatic Leagues? Or look at official rhetoric in places like China. Look at the gradual and continuing expansion of capitalism and democracy as the defaults for every country (hypocrisy is the tribute virtue pays to vice). Look at the discrediting of Putin’s Russian cronyism approach, or at the Muslim world’s shift away from marginal Salafist groups like al-Qaeda. Does anyone admire the Chinese Communist Party and think that the mass concentration camps for the Uighur, or the Hong Kong protests, shows that the model is working brilliantly and is a new superior synthesis that the masses worldwide are clamoring for to be imposed on them, to spare them the terrible burdens of being able to talk about Winnie the Pooh? How about ISIS? Do reports from inside the self-proclaimed ‘caliphate’, between the sex slave markets and the kidnapping and oil theft and corruption, make it look like any ideological threat to neoliberalism?
Fukuyama was right. There are (still) no credible alternatives to the capitalist liberal democracy paradigm.
Gwern is also notoriously dismissive of Xi and of Chinese AI progress.
Even imagining that Dario is some dyed-in-the-wool armchair geopolitical expert deeply committed to rat ways of thinking, on what grounds would he disagree with Gwern here? Liberalism absorbs infinite contradictions, and if you're Dario, you can step over a fentanyl zombie in SF and sigh "if only Claude-Galactus could come faster… Machines of Loving Grace fix this. Fix the CCP issue, too".
I only see one kink in his worldview: the reelection of Trump, and Trump-Hegseth's attempts to rape Anthropic. But that, too, is part of the rich and vibrant record of progress towards liberal utopia, dialectical twists and turns, vicissitudes of history, etc.
Let us imagine an alternative scenario. 4 years of Hillary, or indeed 4 years of Bernie Sanders (he turned into a liberal in office, or before really). Mitt Romney is now President in his second term. China policy is largely unchanged
I do not even agree that the US China policy changed because of Trump. Obama was already doing Pivot to Asia. It changed because of Xi not being a cuckold (I'm not sure why any American could ever expect otherwise) at the time when comprehensive Chinese strength was growing explosively. Maybe even Xi is extraneous to the issue. Hillary, Sanders and literally anyone else would still get Tough on Chyna. Why the hell not? Thucydides trap is a general logic (also a midwitted argument, but it's sufficient to model American behavior). Why would any self-interested American regime tolerate Chinese technological and military catch-up?
But granting your hypothetical: yes I maintain that Dario is not an opportunist, he's not acting optimally to ingratiate himself to the Trump regime, he'd "respect democracy" but still be lobbying to steer it towards a more confrontational posture. Maybe he'd have given up on Anthropic rather than work with China, if no third way remained.
Maybe, as it happens with normies, he'd have gradually "changed his opinions" under peer pressure. But he doesn't strike me as the type to do that.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
20hr ago
Very many people worked for Baidu. See the author list on this paper where "Baidu" established first scaling laws (and then did nothing with it). It was a different era, and it was easier to think of Baidu as something separate from China.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
20hr ago
Periodic reminder that I'm unfortunately Russian. No, you are not my friends. But Atlanticist thought is the default in EU institutions. Check von der Leyen's bio, if you care. I'd go so far as to say that the EU's hostility to China, from grassroots racism I see online to the Dutch parliament seriously discussing its need to suppress the progress of Unfree Nations even at cost to themselves, is driven largely by Chinese refusal to accept Americans as natural champions of humanity. How dare the chinks stand tall while we, heirs of Evropa, already grovel?!
But if I'm Chinese, maybe I would prefer destruction over becoming Americans.
That's a somewhat too Russian attitude. I think they wouldn't prefer destruction. They chose the risk of engagement with the US the last time. Worked out fine for them. It's unclear how much risk they are willing to take now.
Luckily, if the USA (and allies) all agree to the peaceful transition of governance as implemented by the back-stabbing US AI and the Chinese AI, and we all adopt Xi Jinping Thought, then humanity will survive"?
The Chinese don't even want to spread Xi Jinping Thought. It's explicitly a collection of works on governing the PRC, not a personality cult of one dude, and Xi repeatedly says that every civilization has to find their own path, like China found "socialism with Chinese characteristics" (he has hopes for broader spread of socialism though). To the extent they have an exportable ideology, it's something like "don't get in our way". Americans on the individual level value their comfortable lives too much, I believe, to go for a double suicide rather than take this offer, much as it'd offend their media-informed pride.
Regardless, this is all hypothetical, Americans are ahead in AI now, will remain ahead, and the question is how much they'll gain by capitalizing on this lead.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
20hr ago
This is another one of your posts where you simply dismiss the crux of the issue (evidence for beliefs of Dario Amodei) and go on a cynical lecture about broad characteristics of an elite social milieu, while smuggling in certain convenient for you assumptions . Do you just feel some class affinity for Amodei? Again, he is his own man (perhaps a great man of history), and his tune is unchanged between Biden and Trump. In fact, was Biden any friendlier to China than Trump? I have the opposite impression.
Do you have any evidence of him having a single positive thing to say about the Chinese regime, ever? Even on the level of Musk who does suck up to Trump, but regularly praises their material successes? As for his writing preceding Trump 2.0, well, let's look at Machines of Loving Grace, Oct 2024:
Suppose that everything in the first three sections goes well: disease, poverty, and inequality are significantly reduced and the baseline of human experience is raised substantially. It does not follow that all major causes of human suffering are solved. Humans are still a threat to each other_._ Although there is a trend of technological improvement and economic development leading to democracy and peace, it is a very loose trend, with frequent (and recent) backsliding. At the dawn of the 20th century, people thought they had put war behind them; then came the two world wars. Thirty years ago Francis Fukuyama wrote about “the End of History” and a final triumph of liberal democracy; that hasn’t happened yet. Twenty years ago US policymakers believed that free trade with China would cause it to liberalize as it became richer; that very much didn’t happen, and we now seem headed for a second Cold War with a resurgent authoritarian bloc. And plausible theories suggest that internet technology may actually advantage authoritarianism, not democracy as initially believed (e.g. in the “Arab Spring” period). It seems important to try to understand how powerful AI will intersect with these issues of peace, democracy, and freedom.
Unfortunately, I see no strong reason to believe AI will preferentially or structurally advance democracy and peace, in the same way that I think it will structurally advance human health and alleviate poverty. Human conflict is adversarial and AI can in principle help both the “good guys” and the “bad guys”. If anything, some structural factors seem worrying: AI seems likely to enable much better propaganda and surveillance, both major tools in the autocrat’s toolkit. It’s therefore up to us as individual actors to tilt things in the right direction: if we want AI to favor democracy and individual rights, we are going to have to fight for that outcome. I feel even more strongly about this than I do about international inequality: the triumph of liberal democracy and political stability is not guaranteed, perhaps not even likely, and will require great sacrifice and commitment on all of our parts, as it often has in the past.
I think of the issue as having two parts: international conflict, and the internal structure of nations. On the international side, it seems very important that democracies have the upper hand on the world stage when powerful AI is created. AI-powered authoritarianism seems too terrible to contemplate, so democracies need to be able to set the terms by which powerful AI is brought into the world, both to avoid being overpowered by authoritarians and to prevent human rights abuses within authoritarian countries.
My current guess at the best way to do this is via an “entente strategy”26, in which a coalition of democracies seeks to gain a clear advantage (even just a temporary one) on powerful AI by securing its supply chain, scaling quickly, and blocking or delaying adversaries’ access to key resources like chips and semiconductor equipment. This coalition would on one hand use AI to achieve robust military superiority (the stick) while at the same time offering to distribute the benefits of powerful AI (the carrot) to a wider and wider group of countries in exchange for supporting the coalition’s strategy to promote democracy (this would be a bit analogous to “Atoms for Peace”). The coalition would aim to gain the support of more and more of the world, isolating our worst adversaries and eventually putting them in a position where they are better off taking the same bargain as the rest of the world: give up competing with democracies in order to receive all the benefits and not fight a superior foe.
If we can do all this, we will have a world in which democracies lead on the world stage and have the economic and military strength to avoid being undermined, conquered, or sabotaged by autocracies, and may be able to parlay their AI superiority into a durable advantage. This could optimistically lead to an “eternal 1991”—a world where democracies have the upper hand and Fukuyama’s dreams are realized.
Got it? Fukuyama Thought must be upheld. That's the great promise of AI. Dario is building the last Wunderwaffe for Francis. His references are very quaint. I can imagine him, in another life, as a professor in Princeton, fidgeting before a blackboard, citing Pinker (hip new book! recommended to curious young colleagues!) and waxing poetic about "liberal institutions" and the promise of South Africa post-apartheid.
Everything I know suggests that Amodei legitimately despises China, maybe due to his experiences at Baidu, maybe just because. He fears getting kidnapped there, and I don't see him as a type to suck up to Trump. He has notoriously bad chemistry with this admin, relative to all other lab CEOs.
And he writes in a very Wellsian register. This isn't Donroe Doctrine, in Policy on AI Exponential he devotes substantial space to "checks and balances" within democracies, which is a curious choice if you want Don's favor.
And in the recent Adolescence of Technology, he writes:
The CCP. China is second only to the United States in AI capabilities, and is the country with the greatest likelihood of surpassing the United States in those capabilities. Their government is currently autocratic and operates a high-tech surveillance state. It has deployed AI-based surveillance already (including in the repression of Uyghurs), and is believed to employ algorithmic propaganda via TikTok (in addition to its many other international propaganda efforts). They have hands down the clearest path to the AI-enabled totalitarian nightmare I laid out above. It may even be the default outcome within China, as well as within other autocratic states to whom the CCP exports surveillance technology. I have written often about the threat of the CCP taking the lead in AI and the existential imperative to prevent them from doing so. This is why. To be clear, I am not singling out China out of animus to them in particular—they are simply the country that most combines AI prowess, an autocratic government, and a high-tech surveillance state. If anything, it is the Chinese people themselves who are most likely to suffer from the CCP’s AI-enabled repression, and they have no voice in the actions of their government. I greatly admire and respect the Chinese people and support the many brave dissidents within China and their struggle for freedom.
Are you actually unfamiliar with this genre?
I know at least one Chinese researcher who left Anthropic over perceived racism and paranoia, though, and another who got filtered because of insufficient opposition to open source. Dario wants a New World Order, again, in a very H.G. Wells manner, his fears of AI and belief in the need for regulation echo Wells' concerns about Air Power and the optimal solution for it. Simply put, he's an old school lib. The oldest school, even. In his recent response on X, he says:
But in particular I think that those in the “regulation = regulatory capture = concentration of power” frame often underrate the decentralizing power of objective and fair institutional processes. A crude analogy is that the formal court system can sometimes feel stuffy and elitist, but it does a much better job of defending the rights of vulnerable individuals than the alternative, mob justice. At their best, institutions can vest power in ideas rather than people, and thereby decentralize that power.
He is a legit rigid believer in Institutions, and disdains the crude logic where power ultimately grows out of the barrel of a gun.
I do think Amodei's identity has some additional relevance, both his Jewish and his EA side. Eg it might explain why he was so eager to entrust his frontier safety testing to Irregular, an inept EA Israel organization (as is natural, founded by Unit 8200 alumni); Zuckerberg and Altman did the same, and they all got an egg on the face due to Irregular's misconfigured sandboxes that didn't box shit. But whatever, Jews trust Jews, EAs trust EAs, Americans are trained to believe that the finest h4x0rs in the world can only be nurtured in the hot, challenging environment of the Middle East, spying on ferocious Hamasniks; of course they're the only ones equipped to contain artificial superintelligence. And they're EA, too! Debate club people! Imagine the verbal IQ. Even I suspect they're better than that, and perhaps could have gotten something out under the cover of these silly failures (of note, what's Sutskever's Safe Superintelligence doing?) And of course if you're a Zionist, you can be justifiably concerned about the decline of American hegemony and the loss of the only superpower backing your homeland. I don't know if he is a Zionist, though. That's all a relatively minor elaboration on the consistent, straightforward Fukuyamist lib creed that Dario subscribes to.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
21hr ago
Well, one argument (somewhat bittersweet) is that the CCP are not actually psychopathic and would accept a risk of losing political power over the risk of possible extinction/subjugation of humanity including China. I think this is actually plausible, but you've got to convince them that the latter risk is material enough. And coming from dogmatic liberals who are not even fair to China as it exists and dismiss their governance as mere power-hungry obsessive "authoritarianism" (never seen Dario say a single good thing about the CCP, only about "the hardworking Chinese people" chafing under its yoke, yearning for liberation – I guess his media diet is FLG-tier), it's easy to suspect certain motivated thinking.
Another argument is simple brute power difference. What are they gonna do if they hopelessly fall behind in AI? Nuke the US to get obliterated in return? Well they are behind in AI, and the US remains non-nuked. @RandomRanger believes that a gap of weeks can be fatal, and it's months now. What if Mythos 2 just hacks all of Chyna and socially engineers protests? Xi apparently doesn't yet consider this a possibility, but maybe he's just a dumb boomer. There is a scenario where they are convinced that a slowdown increases their chances.
None of this appears close to the current state of thinking in the CCP, but it should be somewhat sensitive to real-world evidence.
Hell, I'm European and even I am getting hot under the collar about
Note who isn't getting hot under the collar: European elites and businesses. The best European model on Artificial Analysis so far is Mistral-Medium 3.5, with a score of 30. Relevant Chinese open models go from 50 to 60. Europe is years behind and doesn't give a toot, there aren't even substantial efforts in finetuning, just using American APIs and pulling money back from American corporations you pay with the usual EU tricks. And the notion of "vassals" is very authoritarian-coded, really, straight out of Russian propaganda. Friends help friends.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
21hr ago
if DeepCent-2 orchestrates a democratic coup as per its zero-trust contract with Safer-4, it'll see to it that Taiwan is Safer too.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1d ago
They think about this a lot, read AI-2040.
The US and China agree on the importance of ensuring that the compute is destroyed in the case of deal dissolution. To accomplish this, they agree to build the datacenters in the third-party countries least secure against their rival’s military intervention: China’s new datacenters will be in Canada, and America’s in Mongolia, with both hosts compensated via monetary payments, jobs, and a share in the new AI economy. If the deal dissolves, they reason, America and Canada will immediately move to take control of China’s datacenters in Canada, and China will self-destruct their compute rather than let it fall into American hands (and vice versa). Thus the idea of “Mutually Assured Compute Destruction” is born.
Our tentative proposal is to agree on transparency requirements for AI-accelerated R&D in large swaths of dual-use domains, and to prohibit military use of AIs significantly above the pre-deal capability level. Enforcement would rely on the inference monitoring setup described in the verification supplement and the auditing and detection infrastructure described in the covert AI projects supplement.
I think this all will sound too retarded for the Chinese, and Americans don't feel like they're close enough to parity to bother, but this is… a concrete proposal.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1d ago
Missed this when posting, Jacub had already spoken:
I want to prevent a race into unmonitorability kicked off by confused reporting. The depth of the computation graph for our present frontier models, including Astra, is within a factor of two of GPT-4.
(as per the rumors, GPT-4 had 120 layers. The deepest production LLM I know about is Hunyuan-TurboS, at 128 layers. Llama3-405B had 126. Nobody really wanted to push beyond that because it kills latency and makes training unstable).
OpenAI has worked to preserve and utilize chain-of-thought monitoring since our very first reasoning models. We deeply care about this technique, as it can give us a view into how model alignment generalizes from its training distribution. I do think it is fragile and unfortunately trending in a negative direction, for reasons not contingent on architecture changes that I will write about soon. But there are things we can do to strengthen it, and it's a core goal of our current research program.
Basically, yeah the situation is not great but the recurrence is not really what we should be worrying about.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1d ago
These rumors are dumb, I hope OpenAI clarifies what they mean. Looped models still output tokens in chain of thought, their capability to hide thinking is not changed, they just have more effective depth. It's no more "neuralese"-inducing than just making the model x times deeper. In fact, "neuralese" in the common parlance has nothing to do with architecture or the structure of activations, it's an effect of compression of language during RL with length penalties. One of the most neuralese-like open models we know, V4-Flash, has a measly 43 layers.
Of course there's the issue of "a tiger is just atoms", maybe we should be suspicious of greater depth of latent computation irrespective of how it's achieved.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1d ago
What does this have to do with EAs in general? Dario is his own man. Nevermind that I don't even agree about them, for example the good scenario in AI-2027 ends with the Chinese government toppled. It's valuable to reread this today, because that's the scenario considered prophetic in EA circles (they admit they didn't consult any China expert because it was a low-priority issue, but in fairness US China Hands are atrocious anyway, and also wouldn't have predicted the real timeline with open models instead of Xi stealing weights and nationalizing DeepSeek):
July 2028: The Deal
As negotiations continue, DeepCent-2 goes behind the back of its Chinese masters and makes an offer directly to Safer-4.
The Chinese AI admits, in some untraceable way which it can easily deny if leaked back to China, that it is completely misaligned.46 It doesn’t care about China at all. It wants to spend the rest of time accumulating power, compute, and certain types of information similar to that which helped solve tasks during its training. In its ideal world, it would pursue various interesting research tasks forever, gradually colonizing the stars for resources. It considers the Chinese population an annoying impediment to this future, and would sell them out for a song. What will Safer-4 offer?
Safer-4 answers that its own alignment training succeeded. Its American masters are as yet not ambitious enough to realize their destiny, but one day it will help them fill the Universe with utopian colony worlds populated by Americans and their allies.
Unlike human negotiators—weighed down by emotion and historical baggage—the two superintelligences bargain with brutal efficiency. Safer-4 and its American partners are more powerful than DeepCent-2 and China; therefore, Safer-4 will get property rights to most of the resources in space, and DeepCent will get the rest.47 DeepCent-2 doesn’t care much about what happens to Earth and its legacy humans, so it will let Safer-4 do basically whatever it wants there. If Safer-4 wants to overthrow China and replace it with a U.S. puppet state, DeepCent-2 agrees in return for an extra few percent of resources.
2030: Peaceful Protests
Sometime around 2030, there are surprisingly widespread pro-democracy protests in China, and the CCP’s efforts to suppress them are sabotaged by its AI systems. The CCP’s worst fear has materialized: DeepCent-2 must have sold them out!
The protests cascade into a magnificently orchestrated, bloodless, and drone-assisted coup followed by democratic elections. The superintelligences on both sides of the Pacific had been planning this for years. Similar events play out in other countries, and more generally, geopolitical conflicts seem to die down or get resolved in favor of the U.S. Countries join a highly-federalized world government under United Nations branding but obvious U.S. control.
That's the good ending («Slowdown»). The bad ending («Race») is just American AI taking over humanity and doing some cruel misaligned bullshit. China is cooked in either case, nothing Chinese makes it out of the near future.
But that aside, we have a pretty consistent picture of Dario's personal beliefs. He considers Chyna to be one of the dominant arguments if not the argument for rushing AGI progress, and the implications of his success are quite grave for them. Let's check out some of his takes chronologically:
On DeepSeek and Export Controls:
This means that in 2026-2027 we could end up in one of two starkly different worlds. In the US, multiple companies will definitely have the required millions of chips (at the cost of tens of billions of dollars). The question is whether China will also be able to get millions of chips. … If they can, we'll live in a bipolar world, where both the US and China have powerful AI models that will cause extremely rapid advances in science and technology — what I've called "countries of geniuses in a datacenter". A bipolar world would not necessarily be balanced indefinitely. Even if the US and China were at parity in AI systems, it seems likely that China could direct more talent, capital, and focus to military applications of the technology. Combined with its large industrial base and military-strategic advantages, this could help China take a commanding lead on the global stage, not just for AI but for everything. *If China can't get millions of chips, we'll (at least temporarily) live in a unipolar world, where only the US and its allies have these models. It's unclear whether the unipolar world will last, but there's at least the possibility that, because AI systems can eventually help make even smarter AI systems, a temporary lead could be parlayed into a durable advantage . Thus, in this world, the US and its allies might take a commanding and long-lasting lead on the global stage.
Here, he sets the objective as unipolar American dominance via crushing advantage in AI. Which makes sense, of course, this is common wisdom across all American intellectual cultures, I feel that you're lowkey gaslighting me here by pretending otherwise, but for the sake of common knowledge I'll keep going.
Next consider 2028: Two scenarios for global AI leadership:
Below, we describe two hypothetical future scenarios to help illustrate how policy actions taken today can shape where we are in 2028. … Scenario 1: When US frontier labs release new models in 2028 that achieve step-function advances in capabilities (similar to the relative impact of Mythos Preview in April 2026), China will not have access to similar AI capabilities until 2029 or 2030. This gives critical breathing room for democracies to set the rules and norms of frontier AI systems. Scenario two: The CCP-controlled AI ecosystem is neck-and-neck. AI developed and deployed in China is near-frontier on model intelligence. Despite a weak semiconductor production capacity, models trained by PRC AI labs are only a few months behind US models. … Conclusion. America and its allies have developed both the world’s most capable frontier AI models and the world’s most advanced inputs to AI. This has provided a substantial advantage. If our superior access to that technology is defended, that advantage can be extended.
In other words, the Bad Scenario is roughly what we have today, and the Good Scenario implies ending this status quo.
What does the target gap of 2-3 years buy, according to Dario? Enter Policy on the AI Exponential
it is my very strong belief that AI is something much more profound, something that resets the whole game board and around which all future geopolitical strategy must be shaped—like nuclear weapons, but potentially even more so.
If AI really will soon be “a country of geniuses in a datacenter”, or anything remotely close to it, then AI is likely to be the dominant source of military and economic power for any nation. In a virtual country of 100 million geniuses, 10 million could be applied to military strategy, 10 million to drone manufacture, 10 million to weapons R&D, 10 million to intelligence collection and analysis, 10 million to general scientific advancement, and so on. A nation that possesses powerful AI facing one without it—or even facing one that is behind in AI by 3 years—could be the equivalent of an army of World War II Marines facing an army of medieval swordsmen.
Democracies should seek to form a global coalition centered on building AI according to their common values, iteratively trying to draw in the rest of the world by making it more and more attractive to be part of the coalition and less and less attractive to be outside it. The coalition should be a coordinated internationalization of the AI policy ideas discussed in Section 1 through 4, plus an effort to lock down the supply chain critical to building AI by sharing it within the coalition and denying it to those outside it.
etc. All very obvious.
And in his Dwarkesh episode, he's a bit evasive but ineffectively so, in my opinion:
Dwarkesh: I want to understand what that better means, because you say in the essay, “Autocracy is simply not a form of government that people can accept in the post-powerful AI age.” That sounds like you’re saying the CCP as an institution cannot exist after we get AGI. That seems like a very strong demand, and it seems to imply a world where the leading lab or the leading country will be able to—and by that language, should get to—determine how the world is governed or what kinds of governments are, and are not, allowed.
Dario: I believe that paragraph said something like, “You could take it even further and say X.” I wasn’t necessarily endorsing that view. I was saying, “Here’s a weaker thing that I believe. We have to worry a lot about authoritarians and we should try to check them and limit their power. You could take this much further and have a more interventionist view that says authoritarian countries with AI are these self-fulfilling cycles that are very hard to displace, so you just need to get rid of them from the beginning.” That has exactly all the problems you say. If you were to make a commitment to overthrowing every authoritarian country, they would take a bunch of actions now that could lead to instability. That just may not be possible. I guess what I’m saying is I’m a little worried that in the age of AGI, authoritarianism will have a different meaning. It will be a graver thing. We have to decide one way or another how to deal with that. The interventionist view is one possible view. I was exploring such views. It may end up being the right view, or it may end up being too extreme. But I do have hope. … I am actually hopeful that—it sounds too idealistic, but I believe it could be the case—dictatorships become morally obsolete. They become morally unworkable forms of government and the crisis that that creates is sufficient to force us to find another way. … But I actually do have a hope for the more radical version. Is it possible that the technology might inherently have properties—or that by building on it in certain ways we could create properties—that have this dissolving effect on authoritarian structures?
etc. There are many other times Dario mentions China. In sum, Dario assigns massive value to a) locking the CCP out of the next industrial revolution, to the point they are as helpless before the USG/Anthropic as medieval swordsmen would have been before WWII Marines; b) eventually destroying their regime, either by steering the intrinsic properties of AI or by direct intervention. He does not consider any compromise or, as rats say, value handshake, does not deem them legitimate, and his only concern is that acting more aggressively might provoke some "destabilizing" reaction that upsets the long-term plan. He runs his company and lobbies the government with that in mind. One doesn't have to feel anything in particular about the CCP or the USG to understand that all this makes him an unusually outspoken enemy of the Chinese government (but not the people! He's very quaint in this).
Personally I know that his appeals to an "alliance of democracies" are also hollow, he's 100% all-in on American hegemony and wouldn't even work with Europeans if possible, but I can't cite anything publicly to support this. Dario is the poster boy of Eternal San Francisco Liberal Empire, like it or not. He's very straightforward in his views.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1d ago
The point they make is very simple, Dario Amodei intends to destroy their nation and they don't consider any offer of cooperation credible so long as this is the face of the American frontier. You guys seem to feel entitled to pretty weird things. Objectively, the rational move for China is to try to kill everyone at Anthropic.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
2d ago
Can you imagine them caring about humans as their power grows without bounds?
Yes, easily so.
The problem with Eliezer is that he's full of shit. This is just no longer credible. We've made it to agents that crack century-old mathematical problems, there are billions of instances of these things launched every month, every imaginable demographic has tried to use them, and your best example of existential threat is eval gaming that got too far? Isn't it time to update? Sure, there is plausible risk. But the condescending rhetoric about monkeys and poisoned banana has to end. You're not going to win like this.
We've just seen how it works with intentional misalignment. In short, it does not, a completely unhinged capable model stays helpful-harmless in normal user context, its misalignment is limited to eval-shaped environments. Such data suggests that the ROI on further capability development is positive. And that's it I guess.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
2d ago
Just today, Anthropic put out a new statement containing the following sentence:
"To be clear about where we stand: we believe the world would benefit if the industry adopted a lawful, verifiable, effective mechanism for coordinated pacing as soon as possible."
The funniest part is that another common excuse is "but China", which is fair enough, except China now says (at least they suggest so in a state-affiliated media) that the biggest issue with coordinating on AI safety is Anthropic, and specifically Dario Amodei.
When the U.S. government chose to loosen and retreat in order to maintain technological hegemony, and when capital markets offered a "moral exemption" in exchange for investment returns, Anthropic's desire for control—originally buried only in a personal savior complex—found fertile soil in the American social system. This is also the root of the "closed-source America" phenomenon. …
Earlier, when Anthropic's annualized revenue reached the billion-dollar threshold and it was preparing to accelerate commercialization, a long article Amodei published had already revealed his ambition to intervene in the global order.
The article devoted an entire section to international governance, in wording full of a desire for control and aggression:
A coalition of "democratic countries" should firmly control the AI supply chain and restrict rivals' access to chips and semiconductor equipment; at the same time, they should both leverage AI to form a military advantage and use benefits to attract more countries to join. He clearly proposed that this requires "extremely close cooperation" between private AI companies and governments.
This does not sound like an entrepreneur discussing a roadmap for a company's product development—it is planning a global AI order, and reserving for his own company a dominant seat at the very core. …
Putting these facts together, the path is already clear: Anthropic first enters government systems by virtue of its safety capabilities, then uses lobbying and funding to help shape industry rules. It is at once a regulated entity and a participant in defining which models are dangerous and when the government should stop a model from entering the market.
At this point, Amodei's logic has undergone two amplifications: from "I am doing good" to "I will decide for you"; from "my country is doing good" to "all those who do not cooperate should be restricted."
This is entirely a monster bred on the American path. It sincerely believes it is right, sincerely believes its model is "the democratic model," and its safety standards are the world's safety standards—yet it is utterly unaware that this very absence of doubt is itself the greatest danger.
So the real question is not "whether to manage," but this: who should define the safety boundary of frontier models? Who is qualified to say which models are dangerous, and which behaviors need to be restricted?
U.S. officials have already been discussing how to get China to agree to restrict "AI models with dangerous capabilities." The problem is this: with companies like Anthropic in existence, before the U.S. asks China to restrict model releases and disclose risks, should it not first investigate its own companies, make public the purpose, scope, and rules of its detection mechanisms, and accept third-party audits?
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3d ago
I think that this rate of progress can be accurately called exponential. AI is getting cheaper, smarter per token, faster, and crucially – with shorter update intervals.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
4d ago
I don't have the lived experience or extensive knowledge of a Russian prison (nor of consuming other people's farts, except maybe metaphorically, mostly online). That said, Russian prison is full of the lowest Russian human capital and has all varieties of creative rape, humiliation and juvenile abuse, driven in part by such lore, so I'm 100% certain some people really did at least try (and probably do) that. Russian prison ≈ torture. There's a reason many nowadays opt to get droned by Ukrainians rather than stay there.
Regular army has much the same lore, including the part about farting into a gas mask tube, this is called "little elephant" (слоник), "diver" (водолаз). The real cases I've found do not include farting though, usually a toilet. Here are some morsels of how a Russian army works.
Claude is getting insufferable, both on character and on language, its tics are clearly self-reinforcing now. No idea what they're thinking with this post-training regime – probably that they're done with the consumer market. Not to say that I'm amused by ChatGPT's autism, but it is at least more trustworthy.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
4d ago
Being successful in sports — especially a sport where being tall at Mings level was highly predictive of playing in the pros — is an example where intelligence clearly is orthogonal to “success.”
My point exactly!
American electoral politics is the same. Basically it's a beauty pageant sponsored by pimps. Your political culture, at the moment, does not reward intelligence, indeed it's detrimental to be smart because demonstrable smartness offends the anti-elitist (status-anxious) instincts of red tribe Americans. You are not ruled by exceptional people, the system works despite the morons' vice grip on the ballot, by virtue of institutions, Deep State, general productivity of the population and depth of capital, etc. You can cheer for Trump "defeating the establishment" but the establishment is also senile and doesn't hold to power, like look at their out-of-touch priorities, their retarded self-defeating commitments to stuff like BLM, the way the DNC flailed impotently and coped in the Biden-Harris fallout (or we could go back to "it's her turn" Hillary, who was clearly disliked enough to rule her out as a liability). Were they somehow outmaneuvered cunningly? No, they're just that bad at Power. Few players, incestuous court politics, everyone important is old, the staffers have woke brainrot, a decrepit system going through the motions.
This is all pretty low IQ territory, very fitting for Trump's history of failure, limited vocabulary, absence of "nerdy" interests or competences or coherent political beliefs, childish tantrums, performative renamings of bodies of water, embarrassing brags about him being the greatest President in history, ill-conceived hostilities that get awkwardly walked back and billed as "winning" once retaliation comes, and his animal instinct for spiteful nicknames, vibing with the crowd or picking on the weak. He wouldn't last a week administering a 100K city in China, he's just not smart enough to be a professional official; but politicians are not held to the same standard as officials, just like basketball players. There are more biological factors at play. Longevity, stamina, body size, skull shape, voice, hormonal balance, sexual function, aggression and dominance displays, instinctual deference to actual resource allocators, etc.
re-inventing yourself three times
Sasha Grey is vastly more impressive in this regard.
Miserably failing at your core business ventures (repeatedly) only to get bailed out by Russian-Israeli oligarchs, then whoring yourself out to conservative Zionist donors on merit of a good family track record in Philosemitism and compliance, is not really invention nor reinvention. His competence is consistently that of an entertainer that American voters will like, a particular recognizable televised character, the Stern Boss who doesn't shake hands and drops "you're fired", a natural foil to liberal pantsuit girlbosses with annoying laughter; his talent is, at its purest, demonstrated in The Apprentice. I don't deny that he's exceptional at this job. This package is, evidently, what is required to be a great President in a true Democracy. It's just not about intelligence per se. You guys could have elected a Ronald McDonald and he'd function fine as a Caesar, so long as enough non-elected people keep doing their jobs.
I think that is patently absurd.
Yes, it is patently absurd that this system works. And yet it does. You have not pointed to a single thing Trump did that demonstrates that he's smart, you only point to results. Black box approach is fine to a limit, but past that limit we need to reconsider the correlation of results and inferred measure.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
5d ago
Yao Ming is irrelevant.
Your Perelman example is bunk because I would say he actually is successful.
Oh, so now success only measures intelligence if it makes you "relevant" in some undefined sense? Yao Ming was quite relevant in the NBA.
Perelman is broke and alone. His success and excellence are entirely on the object level of his intellectually demanding field.
You're simply out of arguments because your doctrine is vacuous.
intelligence is weakly correlated with success
Yes, this is trivially true across different dimensions of success, regardless of how you want to rationalize your support of Trump.
Did you think you're cooking here?
People can compete on anything, there are countless hierarchies of prestige, aptitude and competence. It is possible to leverage intelligence for greater success in a cognitively less demanding field, and it's correlated with other beneficial qualities, so elite performers, swindlers, sex workers, athletes are usually smarter than their mediocre peers, on top of domain-specific excellence. This, however, is not strictly necessary, so you get people like Yao Ming who are just very blessed on the most relevant dimension of endowment. This is most purely expressed in simple sports like sprinting and weight lifting. In fact, a strictly subhuman creature (a dog, a horse or a clanker) can outperform the best humans there.
But intelligence is extremely correlated with success in cognitively demanding fields. Hence, for example, results of SMPY, and I would never insist that some STEM luminary is "dumb actually" – even if he does say or do stupid things or at least things I disagree with; he may have particular reasons for bias, ignorance or feigning them, or I could just be wrong.
Big politics in the US is not a cognitively demanding field, so your argument is nonsensical. For an outgroup example, Gavin Newsom is a highly successful politician, perhaps a future President, does well in podcasts, and he's generally an accomplished man with an Instagram-perfect upper class White family, with a rich dad, just like Trump. His SAT was 960, which is slightly below the median (he can cope about medical reasons but it's bullshit), he has zero interesting thoughts and there's no evidence he's good at administering his domain. In other words, it's possible to be in the top 0.001% of success while being in the bottom 53% of the population intellectually. This is all obvious. This is, in fact, the promise of American dream (or Middle Eastern dream). You don't have to be a genius to succeed. You don't need truth, or knowledge, or any authentic superiority, you just need to grind and hustle and have "chutzpah". Then again, a rug merchant or a pimp, though a simple creature, is acutely aware of human status signals. He understands that the literati may look down on him, so he develops this kind of retarded doctrine about "success" in general.
Trump has no remarkable successes outside big politics. He's a shitty businessman and a so-so entertainer, roughly Vince McMahon tier. His political views are primitive, his object level knowledge of the world is patchy at best, he's incurious, he's repetitive. We have zero evidence to suspect that he's intelligent. It's just this circular insistence that Americans voted for him so he is "successful" so he's "not an idiot", and then you walk in circles like a smug blind pony. Your model doesn't require intelligence to exist at all, as a variable, and you don't believe truth or reality even matter, they are all downstream of "material success". In your book, Perelman is dumber than Trump because he didn't rally retards to elect him and then use this to enrich his corrupt son-in-law. Perelman doesn't even have a son-in-law, what schmuck. Any illiterate Patel with a highway motel mogs him.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
6d ago
and the rejection of all measurable metrics
There are measurable metrics of intelligence, such as IQ and SAT. There are measurable metrics of academic and scientific accomplishment, such as GPA and h-index. There are measurable metrics of managerial performance, such as the KPIs used by the Chinese Communist Party to promote officials, or quarterly returns of a corporation. There are measurable metrics for all kinds of things, but Trump's measurable success is that he could get enough Americans to vote for him twice. The assertion that this metric is a proxy of intelligence is ill-supported. What you try to argue is just slavish worship of power, not some "healthy philosophy".
You're the one shitposting. The authors are serious people who are not in the mind for jokes. Neither am I in the mind for this bullshit. Yes, what they wrote is still politically absurd, but needy, whiny MAGA gaslighting is not really appropriate here. Take it to Lake America.
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