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Notes -
State actors have trash talent, for reasons discussed earlier. A few outliers, but at this point Google has like 100x NSA's capability. This needs Google's capability at 100x the scale of labor. Where we differ is that I think this doesn't require 100x Google's capability.
Because the American AI only has access to internet-connected surfaces, is rate-limited and needs to avoid detection before breach, whereas Chinese AI has root access to the entire stack plus documentation and source code and can examine those subtle vulnerabilities in a massively parallel manner and at its leisure.
The point you keep missing is that at every point, information and time asymmetry exists in favor of the defender, which I think makes up for the observed qualitative and quantitative advantage of the attacker.
I maintain that this is a lazy hope for having an unfair advantage and scarcely different from "we could bomb three gorges dam, we just choose not to".
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