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Is There Real Anti-Trust Risk From A Coordinated AI Lab Pause?
In AI-pause discussions it is increasingly common to hear the "anti-trust" objection. The idea is that if the labs were to coordinate a pause in frontier AI development, this would be a "conspiracy in restraint of trade" and therefore illegal.
Putting aside the question of whether it is ethical to risk a double-digit chance of destroying the world in order to avoid getting sued (it isn't), is this even a realistic possibility? My impression is that anti-trust law in the United States is legitimately quite fuzzy (as the NCAA is currently discovering).
Putting my cards on the table, I think this argument is cope. The labs want to pretend that they want to pause, but they don't actually want to pause. "If she wanted to, she would," etc. Just today, Anthropic put out a new statement containing the following sentence:
It seems like every time I read a statement from them, they've added more and more qualifications. Are they going to keep racing until congress passes a specific anti-trust exemption? That arguably seems like what the word "lawful" is implying.
The quadrillion dollar question is how do we get China to credibly commit to their own pause? I honestly have never heard a good suggestion for how this could be accomplished. Things like Scott's Plan A, while well-intentioned, seem incredibly naive. Our Kremlinology is no where near the level it needs to be.
Given that we're not going to fix alignment in 6-12 months, China is not going to pause, and US labs are at best 6-12 months ahead, I think the safest outcome is to have an ecosystem of competing agents. The last thing I want is someone like Dario or Sam being made God-Emperor.
I'm incredibly low-confidence about all of this though. Perhaps one reason for Anthropic's incoherent messaging is that they're all just groping in the dark with the rest of us. The people with the strong consistent messaging are more likely to be charlatans.
Nobody is going to be God-Emperor, and that stupid meme needs to die; it's arguing about which monkey gets the poisoned banana, as Eliezer put it. If AIs reach the point of recursive self-improvement leading to artificial superintelligence, we all dead; period.
Look at the weird, alien civilizations that AIs are forming. Can you imagine them caring about humans as their power grows without bounds? I can't. We'll be swept aside by them boiling the oceans to cool servers and building Dyson spheres out of Earth matter with no more thought than we give to paving an anthill to build a road.
I'm going to travel back to South America soon because I want to see my extended family before the world ends.
Yeah, maybe that will happen. But Yud has been wrong about a lot. IIRC he originally thought there would be a fast takeoff Foom event from some solo researcher or small team working on AI with limited access to compute. There’s a page out there with all his wrong predictions of which there are many.
Another way in which AI goes wrong is its use to create a dystopian society in which all human activity is controlled. Perhaps this will be on behalf of the CCP. Perhaps it will be Dario’s “machines of ever loving grace” gone wrong. Imagine what a wokebot will do to abolish whiteness, for example.
Maybe good things will even happen.
Maybe.
If we can actually pause AI training we should. But that involves getting China interested. As far as I know, no one has even tried.
This keeps happening to all the people (including many here on The Motte) who are all about theoretical computation and don't have the slightest clue about just how intricate and deep reaching the required manufacturing and design ecosystem is for all the required hardware. Nvidia and other such AI specific IC makers are just the small visible top of the iceberg. An AI "reaching recursive self improvement" won't do jack shit when it can't control the millions of people who are handling everything else. Likewise absolutely massive part of AI improvement is the training on real world data instead of just some abstract compute and without that data (provided directly or indirectly by humans), there is no improvement, because the AI is just playing in the tiny sandbox.
Not to mention the fact that incorporating new data into the models is a pipeline that takes three to six months as soon as it goes beyond trivial database lookup.
The risk is that giant fields of GPUs and ungodly amounts of data are not known to be inherent requirements for learning. As an existence proof, human brains are far more sample efficient than current architectures. Could there be some algorithm cheaply implemented on existing hardware that takes advantage of whatever learning mechanism the human brain uses? It's unclear but plausible. And discovering that may just be a matter of throwing lots of compute at the problem. A superintelligence that can run on an RTX 5090 in a homelab is a very different threat that is much harder to contain.
I'm somewhat sympathetic to the critique that human brains may be architecturally superior to synchronous, digital GPUs in some critical ways, meaning no software singularity. But I wouldn't bet the world on it.
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