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Notes -
I recommend reading Scott's piece that came out today on this very topic.
The class of bullet biting asked of the yud crowd and what produces risk ww3 results is the equivalent of asking "what if enforcing the law on child pornography requires you to arrest a politician but that causes the politician to start world war 3 in order to overturn the state and prevent himself from being brought to justice". No one is prescribing lethal violence until we're many unlikely levels of escalation past where we'd likely go. Even bombing data centers isn't necessarily lethally violence, and to be clear bombing data centers is itself an unlikely far off escalation.
The comparison I'm trying to make to nuclear proliferation is that you can have these multi-lateral treaties with some teeth and they don't seem like they lead unavoidably to some kind of dystopian state or world war three. We can dig into how much they prevented proliferation, and I think a good deal, but there are other wrinkles in that kind of comparison. Most notably that signatories of the treaties that don't push the frontier of AI will still be able to access state of the art inference, just not the ability to push new frontiers. This is like getting all of the benefits of a nuclear umbrella without needing to go through the trouble of enriching uranium. No one has to go without compute, they have to go without absurdly ridiculous amounts of compute that aren't able to be verified aren't working on training a frontier model. They can have the datacenters, they can run their own inference on them. They just need to have some mechanism to verify they aren't doing the very expensive thing that is training a frontier pushing model. And to almost all nations besides the united states this is a pretty sweet deal and arguably China(I would disagree)! Because if there was a race instead of these treaties they would lose the race and in a lot of cases things would go quite badly for them. The game theory here is significantly more tractable than nuclear proliferation.
If powerful AI comes about that this is a possible plan then all futures have that character. Your sit back and watch plan included. You're not in any way avoiding it.
Again, say you thought the chance of human eradication in the next 20 years was 20%, like many safety people do, would you still council surrender to that fate?
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