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Notes -
Some Thoughts in a Conversational Style
“It’s actually quite easy to block or pause AI development because the compute required (as seen in NVIDIA/TSMC/memory manufacturers/etc’ share prices) is so big that you can’t hide training a major frontier model”.
“So what?”
“This is actually bullish for humanity because it means some guy in a lab probably can’t build an AI that can destroy the human race without anyone noticing”
“But wait, Deepseek and other models have shown that within just a few months of a frontier model’s release, vastly cheaper models can be trained to show similar performance. And even if inference is blocked, local models (which will always leak eventually even if they’re trained with a lot of compute) are probably no more than a year or two behind frontier models. So at best this is holding back the tide by what, months?”
“Yeah, and in the current geopolitical situation, if US businesses complain that Chinese firms have access to more powerful models capable of more efficient and effective work than American businesses, even though America has better frontier labs, because those labs’ models are being blocked from public use by the US government, that will be quickly reversed”.
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