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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   7664 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 31, 2026

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This is something I thought about, but how do they expect to prevent China from pretending to cooperate but continuing in secret?

They think about this a lot, read AI-2040.

The US and China agree on the importance of ensuring that the compute is destroyed in the case of deal dissolution. To accomplish this, they agree to build the datacenters in the third-party countries least secure against their rival’s military intervention: China’s new datacenters will be in Canada, and America’s in Mongolia, with both hosts compensated via monetary payments, jobs, and a share in the new AI economy. If the deal dissolves, they reason, America and Canada will immediately move to take control of China’s datacenters in Canada, and China will self-destruct their compute rather than let it fall into American hands (and vice versa). Thus the idea of “Mutually Assured Compute Destruction” is born.

Our tentative proposal is to agree on transparency requirements for AI-accelerated R&D in large swaths of dual-use domains, and to prohibit military use of AIs significantly above the pre-deal capability level. Enforcement would rely on the inference monitoring setup described in the verification supplement and the auditing and detection infrastructure described in the covert AI projects supplement.

I think this all will sound too retarded for the Chinese, and Americans don't feel like they're close enough to parity to bother, but this is… a concrete proposal.

This is something I thought about, but how do they expect to prevent China from pretending to cooperate but continuing in secret?

How does your excerpt address that? Running a secret data center is equally difficult whether or not you have a public data center running in Canada.

See the Covert AI Projects supplement.

They acknowledge detecting a “small” training is impossible, but today’s frontier models need lots of GPUs which need lots of factories to manufacture, they presume even a nation state would have trouble concealing those without raising suspicion.

(FYI I think it’s more likely China would rig the Canadian data center and steal/defuse the Mongolian one, or the US would vice versa. I haven’t read the full document, maybe they address this too. I do credit these guys for covering their bases.)

It's kind of an open secret among Chinese nationals that the Chinese military loves building shit under mountains. I've heard stories of small underground cities. ChatGPT tells me it's highly likely that the PLA has advanced underground capabilities, with thousands of miles of tunnels.

The supplement hits on building the datacenters and nuclear reactors underground to avoid aerial detection. But you could also build the chip fabs underground. Heck, you could mine the raw materials and transport them to the fab without them ever coming above ground.

And with so much non-AI underground activity that the PLA would probably not welcome observation of, you can't infer that there's any prohibited activity going on just because you've seen trucks going into the tunnels.

You can't do anything underground without first moving mass above-ground (unless you find some convenient caves I guess). Excavations are also detectable seismically, and there will be chemical and thermal signatures for large scale projects. You likely won't hide gigawatts of compute under the mountains. In a world chock full with sensors integrated into AI data processing, it's hard to hide anything significant.

Their thesis is not unworkable.

There's also the water problem. The ground is a very good insulator, and you have to cool the water somehow. Cooling towers in the middle of nowhere would definitely raise suspicion.

Lots of water underground -- could be a good place for open-loop?

Alright so the idea is, lock up most of a country's GPUs in public data centers so that the secret ones will need new GPUs which are hard to build in secret.

Yeah I could list objections but fundamentally it just doesn't ring true to me.

Surely you put the American datacenters in North Korea over Mongolia, no? That way if the US reneges they'll find out when they wake up tomorrow morning that their data centers are now being used to find the most effective way of nuking American soil...

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