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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.
Perhaps I am too cynical but the call for government coordination seems like an obvious attempt to build themselves a moat in a largely moatless space. My own experience has been the cost of model switching is near 0. Approximately all the agents, skills, whatever I've used in my job work pretty seamlessly for any of the underlying models. Some have their quirks but essentially all of them are good enough.
"We the current frontier mousetrap makers think it should be ILLEGAL for anyone to build a better mousetrap faster than we can, for the good of humanity."
Why would the current winners of the race want this? This would be catastrophic for their companies as others caught up. Ironically its the current losers that would cynically want this as it would allow them to catch up. I'm so tired of these takes that hallucinate some cynical interest that falls apart in two seconds of thought because it's impossible to imagine that the type of people who have been publicly posting about and discussing the dangerous ai since before the industry existed could possibly care about the singular thing they've been warning about for over a decade.
Who? Who the fuck are these other better mouse trap makers that they're afraid of? it doesn't make any sense. If signaling that they're willing to give up their lead isn't enough to show you that they are serious about the problem then what possible action could change your mind?
Because any regulatory regime is likely to impose costs that they can bear but competitors may not be able to. Whatever the "verifiable, effective mechanism for coordinated pacing" is it will not be free to implement. If they are serious about their commitments, they can always go slower voluntarily. Nobody has a gun to their head telling them to improve as fast as possible.
There doesn't have to be someone today. There may be someone(s) in the future. OpenAI was far ahead in the AI space, until they weren't. I know of no reason why some other company couldn't come along and supplant both of them.
I don't really see how this is signalling giving up their lead. Giving it up to who?
Like what? Need a remind you that the table stakes for being a frontier lab are billions of dollars worth of compute?
The game theory here is obvious. Unilateral disarmament is not a serious proposal.
Google? Meta? Chinese labs? All pauses I've seen proposed are against the training of models past the frontier, not preventing trailing labs from catching up to the frontier.
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