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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   12760 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 20, 2026

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Unfortunately the majority of AI safety activists believe that safety comes only through obscurity, regulation, and incumbent dominance, in contrast to all previous history.

The AI Futures Project is proposing the opposite-- regulation, yes, but with openness as to training and algorithms with many players able to enter the arena. It's in the regulation-free environment that the labs (save the Chinese ones that are behind anyway) have been extremely closed and secretive.

Interesting. I haven't heard of this one as there are so many propositions that the most extreme ones have tended to suck the air out of the room. Could you go into a bit more detail?

This is Plan A, which involves four principles:

Buy Time: Slow down whenever is needed to have high confidence in safety.

Total Research Transparency: Make almost all AI research fully visible to the public.

Diffuse AI Broadly: Many companies in many countries at the frontier.

Reversibility: Limit algorithmic progress; maintain Mutually Assured Compute Destruction.

In fleshing out the scenario, they say:

This principle is largely achieved by the interaction of the previous two:78 Because algorithmic secrets are made public and the pace of progress isn’t accelerating, other companies will catch up to the frontier. The result will be a competitive market for AI, in which consumers of AI services have many options to choose from and excellent visibility into what they are buying. Because frontier model training is totally transparent, people can verify that the published Spec accurately describes the goals and values being trained into a model.

Normally, a regulator faces a difficult tradeoff between safety and national competitiveness. Competitors who cut corners will pull ahead of those who proceed cautiously.

But because of the transparency, AI research happening anywhere in the Consortium is visible to everyone else, and the results of regulatory decisions are likewise immediately visible. So if one country’s regulator allows its companies to cut corners, this won’t actually give a competitive advantage to that country because other regulators will immediately notice, get angry, and respond in kind.

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