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Notes -
Is it so clear that this is one of those domains where present trends can be meaningfully extrapolated? Theoretically, bringing any modern country up to the cutting edge of AI amounts to transferring a few TB of data and one container-load of GPUs; if you also want people who can understand and iterate on it, perhaps add a classload of people and at most 8 years of training. The people behind the likes of DeepMind do not strike me as actual +4\sigma-on-the-g-distribution individuals that are in genuine short supply globally to anyone that is not the Cathedral as much as moderately smart people who were at the right place at the right time with the right motivations. As I see it, it's not clear that it wouldn't take just one Chinese drone swarm flying too close to the wrong rock for Japan remember the last few times they surprised powers that wanted a slice of their sleepy islands by sudden and very prolific technological copypasta.
Also, I wanted to thank you for linking the Complex Numbers songs in that previous post of yours you linked. Pretty neat, and colours in my mental image of the direction the Russian offshoot of the rationalist community must have moved in. Did you have anything to do with the people behind it?
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