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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."
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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