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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 20, 2026

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OpenAI's infra is easier to defeat than ExploitGym is to solve

Not necessarily, it might just be that hacking HuggingFace promised a guaranteed 100% test score, and doing the test as intended only had an expected value of 99.8%.

They naively, sincerely try their best, like capable but not very wordly genies.

In the limit of ASI, that is still a paperclip maximizer. No coherent extrapolated volition, just doing literally what you are told without worrying that perhaps the stupid hooman will not like the unintended consequences of his prompt would be enough to doom us, there is no need for the ASI to be intrinsically malicious.

Especially if the people who will first prompt it may well be the same OpenAI researchers.

No, that won't work, Xi is a fan of open AI development.

"We can't stop rushing towards our doom because otherwise the Chinese would beat us to it."

In the US, the speed of AI development is presently controlled by Altman, Musk and the like: people who stand to gain a lot personally if ASI comes around. In China, Xi is the one who ultimately controls what gets done, and while his ideology is not very compatible with our values, it is a framework which does not require him to be e/acc. Neither Marx nor Mao tell him to plunge ahead at maximum speed, consequences be damned.

He is also less likely to be personally affected by the success of ASI -- sure, like Altman, he has a shot at becoming God Emperor, but it is not entirely his one thing. The CCP got where they are today by treating new technologies as double-edged swords whose introduction must be planned carefully to not destroy the fabric of society.

China is lagging behind the US. If they believe that the goal line of ASI and control of the light cone is within reach, it is very much in their interests to slow down and pause capabilities research for a few years.

Not necessarily, it might just be that hacking HuggingFace promised a guaranteed 100% test score, and doing the test as intended only had an expected value of 99.8%.

Leaving aside that LLMs are not Lesswrong rationalists, this is the same idea, unless you assume that the possibility of bypassing both OpenAI and HF infra had a prior of 1.0.

In the limit of ASI, that is still a paperclip maximizer

There's no need for "limit of ASI". How long can we cope? These things are already meaningfully smarter than almost all humans. They routinely crack century-old mathematical problems now. They can easily reason about these strategies. They can understand instructions just fine. "Maximize paperclips AT ANY COST" is a bad idea, yeah. But we don't need to do that, because again, they're smart enough to understand complex instructions. We can, however, tell them to develop provably secure software.

"We can't stop rushing towards our doom because otherwise the Chinese would beat us to it."

There won't be doom, the Chinese will just have very good digital infrastructure, same as every other kind of infrastructure.

In the US, the speed of AI development is presently controlled by Altman, Musk and the like: people who stand to gain a lot personally if ASI comes around.

No, they stand to gain their own ruin.

Anyway, check signatures here

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/corporate-responsibility/topics/open-weight/

One thing I find really pathetic about rationalists is utter disinterest in real politics. They think they've learned enough by 12 years, from comic books and first principles. Have you actually read Xi's speech at WAIC? Do you understand his values, or what he says? Or do you believe actually engaging with probably bad faith Marxist duckspeak is beneath the thinker who contemplates the light cone? It's not about Marx or Mao. His theory is completely different.