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Yes, this is exactly my point, which is why I’m sure I must be making it poorly.
This is boring, dull, milquetoast, whatever you want to call it undergraduate neolib essay writing of the kind that was played out when I was at college a decade ago. It was played out a decade before that, honestly. These are not the views of a man with opinions on geopolitics, they are the views of a man without them. They are the boilerplate, standard views you’ll find in any (Western) UN worker or think tank report writer or ESG consultant or World Bank graduate trainee. This is relevant. Even Scott has his strange ideological idiosyncrasies, Dario has none. Is that not curious? This is a relatively intelligent man, after all. Yet his views on democracy, geopolitics, liberalism, blah blah are those of the average summer intern at the European Union? They’re the views of the professor of your introduction to political science 101 class at a third-tier British university? No, I find that unlikely. Those in this rationalist space who care about geopolitics, and there are and were many, regardless of ideology, did not just ctrl-c and v 104 IQ midwit texts by Fukuyama and Pinker. If they agreed with the thrust, they had the good sense to dress it up. Bill Gates and Obama have more considered, more nuanced views than those expressed in Amodei’s limited writings.
The others have their autism under control, except for Musk, who I think is in genuine awe of Trump, wants his affection, and also agrees with him politically more than the rest.
Are the Zionists selling American secrets to the Chinese or terrified of their rise? Sometimes both, perhaps, but I don’t think China will determine the outcome of that conflict.
Let us imagine an alternative scenario. 4 years of Hillary, or indeed 4 years of Bernie Sanders (he turned into a liberal in office, or before really). Mitt Romney is now President in his second term. China policy is largely unchanged (a couple of large Utah business concerns do a lot of business there, and the CCP very quietly allowed in some more Mormon missionaries). Do you think Dario Amodei unilaterally refuses to sell Claude to the Chinese, unlike all his competitors? Does he go on a one-man crusade while Sam Altman and Jensen Huang run a GPU-and-GPT roadshow through every second and third tier city in China?
I doubt it.
I take it that you struggle to imagine a very intelligent man (and Dario is extremely intelligent) with political views you consider midwitted. But why? For me, this sounds completely natural. Plenty of luminaries have normie beliefs. Von Neumann was a cookie cutter hawk, many of his peers were naive pro-Soviet useful idiots. And as Pelevin has observed, America is a land of intellectuals, not intelligentsia; white collar professionals are cogs in a well-oiled economic machine, they have their caste specializations, it's cringe and inappropriate for an AGI lab CEO to seek out some contrarian cesspit to have his reddit tier opinions on le CCP challenged. He's read Fukuyama, Pinker and, with some luck in the airport, Yuval Noah Harari, and he can already be proud of his erudition and the ability to carve out time for such intellectual explorations; maybe he vaguely "knows" that 1984 is a criticism of Chinese Authoritarianism; perhaps he follows Noah Smith and Ezra Klein to keep abreast of the cutting-edge discourse; Yglesias, Hanania, Scott would already be veering into a weird, dangerous, confusing territory. If he were to deviate even more, who should he listen to instead, me? (For the record, Dario doesn't follow me on X, though he doesn't follow anybody). Tooze, maybe? Tooze is a dirty sellout traitor.
Further, rationalists generally have shit taste and little interest in the object level reality, their intuitions about the world are based on popular media franchises. Dario is at least sophisticated enough to cite Fukuyama instead of Star Wars and Harry Potter.
More importantly, why do you even think that his views are illegitimate? What specifically is wrong in what he says? Why must he add some personal quirky flourish on it? Liberalism is a coherent philosophy of the winners of history, and Fukuyama is a prophet for his civilization. Gwern of all people thinks very highly of him.:
Gwern is also notoriously dismissive of Xi and of Chinese AI progress.
Even imagining that Dario is some dyed-in-the-wool armchair geopolitical expert deeply committed to rat ways of thinking, on what grounds would he disagree with Gwern here? Liberalism absorbs infinite contradictions, and if you're Dario, you can step over a fentanyl zombie in SF and sigh "if only Claude-Galactus could come faster… Machines of Loving Grace fix this. Fix the CCP issue, too".
I only see one kink in his worldview: the reelection of Trump, and Trump-Hegseth's attempts to rape Anthropic. But that, too, is part of the rich and vibrant record of progress towards liberal utopia, dialectical twists and turns, vicissitudes of history, etc.
I do not even agree that the US China policy changed because of Trump. Obama was already doing Pivot to Asia. It changed because of Xi not being a cuckold (I'm not sure why any American could ever expect otherwise) at the time when comprehensive Chinese strength was growing explosively. Maybe even Xi is extraneous to the issue. Hillary, Sanders and literally anyone else would still get Tough on Chyna. Why the hell not? Thucydides trap is a general logic (also a midwitted argument, but it's sufficient to model American behavior). Why would any self-interested American regime tolerate Chinese technological and military catch-up?
But granting your hypothetical: yes I maintain that Dario is not an opportunist, he's not acting optimally to ingratiate himself to the Trump regime, he'd "respect democracy" but still be lobbying to steer it towards a more confrontational posture. Maybe he'd have given up on Anthropic rather than work with China, if no third way remained.
Maybe, as it happens with normies, he'd have gradually "changed his opinions" under peer pressure. But he doesn't strike me as the type to do that.
"Capitalist" is doing the heavy lifting here, not "liberalism". If the American economy slumps, slumps hard and slumps badly, that will have a knock-on effect globally. I think we got tastes of that before with 2008 and with the supply chain issues during the pandemic. I don't think China would enjoy the economic collapse either, but they probably have a stronger framework in place to crush dissent, hunker down, and survive. I don't think China is the coming superpower, because I'm old enough to remember when Japan was forecast to be the new global superpower thanks to its strong and dominant economy and we all saw how that turned out, but the rise of right-wing populism in the West should call for a reflection on "is liberalism enough?"
When the money runs out, when belts have to be tightened, when jobs are being shed like falling leaves in autumn, a Strong Leader looks appealing.
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Again, this isn’t about Gwern or Fukuyama, both of whom are very well read people, and both of whom actually have occasionally heterodox views of the kind ‘the academy’ (or generic midwit liberalism) would either balk at or at least raise eyebrows at. There are plenty of people with probably very substantial intelligence who essentially believe in this universalized western liberal democracy view of history, Mark Carney is one example that immediately comes to mind. There used to be some here in the old days (depending on exact definition there still are one or two). Dario’s writings do not come across this way. Maybe it’s easier to fool people when you can ask a decent LLM what a good counterargument is to that annoying commenter on the internet, but fortunately we have pre-AI Dario writings and they didn’t get more or less interesting.
Sanders would have called Xi Jinping an enemy of ‘western civilization’ and significantly scaled up defense spending and the US military presence in East Asia? Interesting. You speak about Trump/Hegseth’s China views as if these people - despite being the prime enemies of UN EU institutional neolib Washington consensus world bank international organization Kennedy school types for the last decade, far moreso than China - are completely separate from Amodei, as if they just independently arrived at the same conclusion at the exact same time because of the inevitability of historical circumstance, Thucydides etc. Convenient if true, that these events are all independent superstructures on the same base, I think. As is the suggestion that Amodei would, in my hypothetical, rather abandon everything and become another EA blogger (cross posted mockingly here?) if he was forced (by the market, investors, the government) to sell to China, but was rescued by Trump and Hegseth.
Because it is functionally unstoppable. Why did Britain not declare war on America in 1918, or 1945, or 1870 (the last time it would have been remotely feasible, perhaps) for that matter? By the way, this is the opinion of all the actual anti-Trump super rich and/or powerful neoliberal types I know, both in America and Europe, both young and old, that accommodation and a deal with China is necessary, that competition is futile. It is people of rather different beliefs pushing for a military confrontation with Xi. Conflating them is like saying that Macron surely wanted Trump to kill the Ayatollah, or that Trudeau surely relished his tariffs. There is no requirement for ideological coherence, but socialization, culture, education, class, background and geography bound distinct political groupings. Amodei does not belong to the recognizably hawkish neoconservative and pro-war, pro-conflict with China, Atlanticist framework of Thiel, of Karp. Max out defense spending, end woke, civilizational chauvinism, complex views on 20th century European philosophy. Fukuyama himself does not seek war with China; if anything, the End of History was about that conflict being already won. If it was, there is nothing left to do but wait.
To get Biden out of the way, fresh news: US urged to consider military strikes to stop China achieving AGI first
Who is this bright young fellow urging the ponderous USG to think faster from first principles – a rationalist perhaps, or a MAGA patriot?
No, he's a Team Blue normie. So yeah, I'll just flat out refuse to engage further with your theory about US-China antagonism being something particular to Trump. Whether it's gaslighting or cope, I do not know. But the US is a creedal nation, a messianic project, and a great military power, and it does as all great powers do. At least powers of its own lineage – I like this theory that Western leaders fundamentally earn their legitimacy by projecting the capacity to militarily defeat foes, whereas Chinese ones can earn enough goodwill with managing responses to natural phenomena in the limited domain. Conqueror-kings versus engineer-kings, very cute Orientalism… If you want something more Occidental, peruse this charming article by Conrad Bastable:
…And yes, the British Crown did fight the US. It lost. Rather hard to budget the invasion of a continent chock full of people on a similar technological level – ask Japan how that goes. Then it lost what remained of its grandeur in WWII. It was also the same race, creed and civilization, so accepting the loss proved to be easier than in earlier cases, perhaps. And this case is genuinely different even if we discard these relics of early Anthropocene.
But I don't want to discard the most quaint of all relics: Human faith.
You, 2rafa, fundamentally lack faith, and that's the crux of our disagreement. You were also in denial of the "faith" which started the war that drove me out of Russia; you were pooh-poohing Israel's willingness to finish the job after Oct 7; you are repeatedly surprised by actions of men with real beliefs. You think that faith is for the rubes, frankly for cattle; people of your milieu optimize for money, pleasures, class… and signaling. Dress it up as you will in polite chuckling about odd lack of heterodox novelty – the most pious zealot is no more an iconoclast than the basest Pharisee, nor has any more reason to signal his sophistication. Zealots only begin Reformation when they see Pharisees in control of the temple, and there is no such recognition in the Moldbuggian Cathedral of Liberalism where Dario prays. The End of History means a liberal transformation of the world, not some cope about the CCP having already lost on soft power or whatever.
In The Kindly Ones, the protagonist, SS officer Maximilien Aue, has a a heart-to-heart with a captured politruk Pravdin. I don't have the English copy at hand to quote, but the essence of Pravdin's argument is that Nazis and Bolsheviks are very similar in the core structure of their ideologies: determinism (historical or racial), natural allies and enemies, and the shared disgust for your kind.
This episode is clever but a bit stilted; both Pravdin and Aue are beautifully, unrealistically conscious and intellectually serious people (though that's their job). I, representing the CCP as an advocate, could perhaps talk like this to Dario; but Dario would need to be very high on something out of Qualia Computing's apothecary to engage. Of course, he could maybe say the same about me. He doesn't think anything of the billion-out-of-poverty stuff (Machines of Loving Grace would do that faster and cleaner and better anyway…), he finds The Great Rejuvenaton some duckspeak. He regards the CCP as a cancer that Anthropic's technology will cure next, or even less – as an undesirable pattern to be dissolved, some confusion of history that has seized the Chinese people. Maybe like postpartum depression. Just look at this:
A majestic specimen, don't you agree? He's cognitively blind to the questions about whether his crusade allows for peace, because he isn't even at war, he's a doctor developing a treatment program. Schmitt, if I remember correctly, condemned liberalism precisely for this denial of true enmity. This is orthodoxy. Again, very H.G. Wells of him! Wells also talked of "dissolving" shit way above his pay grade, of the global Airmen Dictatorship, even. Same essays, only book length. Ended up as a Mind at the End of his Tether. But Dario is still young. And, as a San Franciscan born and raised, likely hasn't read that stuff. As an American entrepreneur, he's unlikely to reflect on it other than "it's worth to try better".
Here's the kicker. Dario might be objectively correct. He doesn't need to accept the self-serving defeatism of double-dealing Wall Street xiaoren. He's legit building an asymmetric superweapon, and lobbying for the possibility of more such superweapons to be built in the US, with very openly admitted ends. Look at Fable 5.1. Do you really still think that Chyna is «functionally unstoppable»? Does it not excite you that this might be wrong, thanks to one very profitable technological Hail Mary? Isn't half of the Western Canon (I mean Marvel, Star Wars, vidya etc. – the distributed brainwashing) precisely about a rag-tag bunch of plucky underdogs (now a polycule or group house, perhaps) coming up with such a last minute save to crush the unstoppable Evil Hive Bug Empire? Policy on the AI Exponential literally opens with a reference to LoTR… If not for AI, almost certainly China becomes unstoppable. In the longer AI timelines, very likely the same. But if he continues to control more compute than the entire Chinese ecosystem? And if RSI works in the next 1-4 years? (It totally works already, just a relatively modest kind, they're working on this). He's in a position to turn their infra into Swiss cheese. To stream Tank Man on every Huawei screen, or more realistically, engineer agents to reach the silos… Even if he has to do that alone, because somebody has to and no one else will, no one else will be man enough to do the rationally optimal thing, not even in his EA circles. But he's not reckless, no. He wants a durable, crushing, systemic advantage. And he can succeed.
Just try to imagine the ego boost his position can forge. The glorious weight of responsiblity such a realization can confer… or can you? He feels like he's a special man, born just at the right time to save his civilization, to save EVERY civilization (they're all the same temporarily confused lib shit anyway), to kill Moloch, to undo the mistake that was about to become a permanent facet of reality; to recarve the world without this facet, like Jalaketu promised Thamiel in Unsong. If China reaches parity in superhuman AI, they (well, subjects of the CCP) will be forever denied Liberty; the long arc of history will break; the Covenant comes undone. But here Dario comes swinging! He is bringing Loving Grace, bringing Salvation at the tip of the Exponential!
What IPO talk after this. IPOs are means to an end.
Does «Dario Amodei» sound kabbalistically necessary enough to you? It does to me. We've all read the same stuff and it was potent enough to forge this itinerant community, but you seem to still be in denial that it's all been in earnest.
I think Dario is very intelligent, entirely earnest, and so far supremely vindicated in his technical bets, which to this day are subjected to sneers by now-irrelevant sophisticates of the AI world, these Marcuses and LeCuns. Who are we to say his political bets will fare worse?
In my opinions, they'll be catastrophic, but that's par for the course in this genre. I only say that I see a true believer. Maybe you don't think his social class can beget one. Maybe you're wrong about his class. Maybe Zhou Enlai had a good point when he told Khrushchev that they're both class traitors. But in any case, I believe you need to finally update your priors.
P.S. I've failed to develop this line well, because I got lost in the flow again. But it's important. Dario is not just reciting duckspeak; he does deviate from the supposed orthodoxy of his milieu. Please reread On DeepSeek and Export Controls.
Dario hedges. "Would not necessarily". "Likely". "Could". You of all people understand that this is both necessary to not sound insane in public communication and also is just prudent Bayesianism. But he means Will. High certainty. Default, convergent, natural, antifragile outcome, in the same register as one could appeal to P(Doom) approaching 1 without alignment efforts. He sees your inevitability, and ALSO he refuses to cope about it being "Fukuyamist actually… dialectically…" or take it lying down, as a fait accompli. Come on now. We all know the shipbuilding ratios, STEM graduate ratios, energy production ratios, robots, drones, missiles, now biopharma, soon reusable missiles, ridiculous Chinese monopolies on stretches of the Periodic Table itself, we see these ecosystems of startups in LLMs, data, whatever, we see the PLAN ballooning on a fraction of US costs, we see the sad wargaming that can't keep track of their arsenal composition, silly games of musical chairs with Allied Scale and grifty submarines to be delivered decades later, all to not admit the unspeakable, that the first and likely second island chain bases are just not defendable with real interceptor math… and frankly the IQ differential between Xi's and Trump's apparatus is hard not to notice. The public can keep huffing Zeihan; Dario, like me, thinks that China is already in an industrial singularity, and modulo the victory in the AGI race the West as a civilization is cooked. Not just prestige-wise, not in the sense that SSE will suck some blood out of NYSE – in his reading, the CCP isn't going to dissolve in vapid degeneracy. At best it'll entrench its autocracy forever, and by default it'll become a superior hegemonic power. This is a minor kink, if you are to be believed. But it's a world of difference.
I don’t appreciate being accused of either cope or gaslighting, but fine. Let’s look at the actual data. There are no orbital strikes on data centers. For all of Yud’s bleating, we’re not bombing Chinese GPU clusters. The actual powers that be care more about Chinese involution on electric car prices than they do about Chinese progress in AI. Anthropic - Dario Amodei himself continues to sell frontier (or at least commercial frontier) model access freely at massive scale to mainland Chinese enterprises, and therefore the Chinese state, via thinly veiled Singapore outposts among others. He lobbied against the US government’s export block, and continues to employ Chinese researchers (do you disagree here?) including those who certainly still have extensive familial and social ties to the mainland, even if he has fewer than Musk.
Judge a man by his actions and his words, then.
You read the tea leaves of Amodei’s effective altruism Gates foundation mosquito net vibe blog posts and public statements, lightcone this and that (Self Made Human, with or without AI, is better at this kind of writing, I won’t patronize you by suggesting you aren’t, although I’m pleased you’ve kept your idiosyncrasies). None of this features a single original thought, or anything that would indicate an unusually (among already intelligent people, not relative to population median) intelligence. Amodei’s resumé is impressive, but not exceptionally so in his class. Plenty of people have PhDs from Stanford. As a researcher or scientist, he was thoroughly unimpressive, he cannot even be mentioned in the same breath as Bengio, Sutskever, LeCun. His main contributions at OpenAI were restating the obvious and some wordcel bullshit on scaling and alignment (meaningless, concrete problems could have been a LessWrong blog post). He played no role in the development, engineering or execution of this epoch defining technology. Unlike Altman, he is not even a particularly ruthless, strategic or manipulative businessman (a respectable skillset on its own), he just has a very greedy and social climbing wife who used her not inconsiderable charms to woo investors and force her boyfriend and later husband into the right rooms. His vocabulary is limited in these texts or quotes (strongly correlated with verbal IQ when writing in one’s native language, which he is), his references are basic and surface level. This isn’t me being a snob, but absent more objective psychometric testing our only way of differentiating between the merely quite intelligent (like most successful corporate executives) and the very intelligent is relying on metrics like this.
This is just not a top mind on geopolitics, the future of humanity, etc. I am humble enough to know I may be very wrong, but there doesn’t seem to be much here. These are all platitudes. There is no huge malice toward China, just some generic neolib angst about ‘authoritarian regimes’ and being upset that capitalism didn’t bring democracy. Amodei doesn’t seem to really know anything. His optimism is vague, his thoughts unstructured, he rambles, he cites Obama. And that brings us to the crux of the whole discussion, which I also mentioned above, which is what the actual plan is here. Right now, Anthropic is not independently undertaking anti-China actions to our knowledge. If anything, the US government (the primary actor in anti-China cyber activity) was angry with Anthropic for not offering advanced model access that may have enabled this until quite recently, unlike OpenAI and others. Is Dario going to unilaterally engage in cyber ops against the CCP? Is it just about telling the ASI “liberate the people of China from gommunism by any means necessary”? If it is, Amodei is entirely superfluous, because someone else in the State Dept will input that prompt. If it isn’t, nothing in any of the writing we’ve discussed suggests or even hints that Amodei has a more complex or developed strategy, or the understanding of China that would inform one.
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Are the super rich, powerful etc neoliberal elites in power, in Britain or the US, now or in the near future? They seem to be increasingly sidelined in the west, among the masses and among the ruling class. And they’re out of power partly because they “sold out” their countries to China, by “allowing” us into the WTO to “flood” their market with cheap stuff, by “allowing” Chinese peasants to make their T shirts, by “allowing” Chinese students to pay insane tuition to their shitty state schools to spend on football teams. Very ungrateful of course, our labor subsidized their lifestyle or they’ll pay as much for grocery and electronics as their plumbers and nannies.
But I agree with you that the likes of Amodei and the likes of Thiel are not to be conflated. They just happen to agree on this particular thing. Which makes me nervous of course.
They are, and even if they are finally sidelined, it's an open question whether the opposition has a meaningfully different vision, or is just using the population's grievances to get into power.
Why the scare quotes? Your country is perfectly aware of the importance of protecting it's own industry.
But that was the very point of the critics of the current system: "we're getting fat and lazy off the backs of Asian labour".
You aren’t American, are you? Anyway, my point is that you don’t “allow” others as if you’re the sole force dictating other nations’ and peoples’ will. Like I said before when someone commented that America allowed the Japanese to develop: the Japanese built their own country. We built our own country. The Europeans built their own country. largely on our own, with sacrifice from our own people, and to your great benefit. So that’s a fair trade, not some altruistic good deed. And to the extent an outside force matters, it’s just a nice bonus, an important one, but still. Why haven’t Africans built their own countries if what mattered was whether you allowed them to develop? That’s delusional cope from failsons.
Yeah, I agree. It’s largely a moral failure of your ruling class, which is why I’m on this forum listening to voices sympathetic to that view. Complain to the them in your country.
Nope, European, easterner living on the west side.
Some countries have more weight to push around, and they use it to their advantage. Europe does it too, I'm sure Chine will too in due time, if it's not already doing it. You can see that sort of thing happen even between individual people.
There's obviously more than one factor involved, being in the good graces of the Americans is not a guarantee of success, but it sure helps! In case of China, I'm sure you guys could reach your current level all on your own, but surely you'll admit that being able to sell goods to the west sped things up?
I'm doing what I can...
Of course. I don’t completely buy the ccp’s “peaceful rise” narrative, although I think there’s truth in it. Even if it’s mostly not kinetic, with our weight we inevitably clash with others’ interests. I just hope it’s more civil and less zero-sum. I’m also not against selling off some of our interests in exchange for others.
I don’t deny it. Unlike the most hawkish Chinese nationalists, I do believe Americans aren’t just being calculating but also have mutual benefits in mind. I’m just saying it’s hypocritical for Americans to bring that up every other minute as if it’s a charity instead of a trade. They enjoyed unparalleled material wealth partly because of Asian (mostly Chinese) labor and Europeans and Japanese/Koreans being their vassals. It’s annoying that they complain about an arrangement they set up for their own interest, but their elite bungled it. Surely as a European you’d understand what I meant.
I feel sympathetic to you guys for having an elite class who constantly sell out their own people to Americans, or worse, to various strains of third worlders who certainly do not deserve it. Is this because of your aristocratic traditions, where the blue bloods share no interests with the muggles? It’s completely mysterious, scary and painful to watch from a distance.
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Under this model I found the ccp’s response quite insufficient and indeed very limited. It seems almost impossible to convince one of the two frontier labs in the US to abandon its hostility toward China. What is the optimal decision for the party? Impose maximum sanctions on Anthropic, which does not operate in China? Restrict rare earth exports further? Build another 5000 silos in Inner Mongolia and wait for the death of humanity? Mandatory Tsinghua CS graduate internship in ds or zhipu? Other covert options? Seems to me that there is very little they can do, except bet that a six-month lead does not turn into lightcone-securing advantages. If that is the case then, idk, the last resort options are pretty appealing. Silos are pretty cheap to build. What’s stopping them from applying maximum pressure now, aside from the pretty risky and irresponsible bet above (and they are risk averse), or them being genuinely incompetent (which I found unlikely)?
They are risk-averse and they are not very imaginative. They avoid risks like, idk, Malacca blockade, but aren't distracted by pie-in-the-sky stories of Mythos-6.7 plowing through their infrastructure, to say nothing of nanobot swarms. They also aren't really that hostile to the US, and do not assign great importance to policies of US companies; their issue with Anthropic is that the USG tolerates this unhinged posture.
There may even be a tragic effect where successes of Chinese companies under compute constraints convince the Party that whining about compute is disingenuous and brilliant Chinese minds adept in mafs will outperform the capitalists regardless, so they don't take Trump's olive branch in the form of limited Nvidia sales either.
Zhipu has an easy time recruiting from Tsinghua on their own. As things stand, China will have to hope that this is enough.
I guess I’m equally unconvinced that the compute and intelligence advantage can be transformed into advantages in the physical world. That does sound like pie-in-the-sky. I find it quite irresponsible to bet your people’s future on grand ideas like that, but I also think underestimating the risk posed by superhuman intelligence controlled by hostile forces is equally irresponsible. I’m not delusional enough to downplay AI’s ability to plow through Chinese digital infrastructure (not that hard anyways, and there has been leaks already), steal state secrets, incite political riots, etc. But how does it turn atoms into physical things? And how much do we stand to lose from a six-month lag before lashing out in nuclear flames? Things still take time to manufacture, and if in a short six months we can be overwhelmed like humans against the Trisolarans, I’m sure that kind of material force will rip apart their society first.
As the current custodians of the Chinese people and Chinese nation, they should be vigilant about these risks. But if we did lose again to the pie-in-the-sky contingency, maybe we deserve it. another century of humiliation, forever under their boots, or extinction. That seems like a fatal flaw of our people.
TBH the ccp might be quite naive. They’re still preaching the “community with a shared future for humanity” nonsense in light of what happened since 2024 (and honestly since the Clinton admin). Their domestic and international propaganda is silly, unconvincing, and just lack the charisma anyways. They’re not going to get that shared future by propaganda, and like how they earned the Chinese people’s support, they’d have to win the goodwill by, what, lifting another bazillion Africans out of poverty? That’s delusional, and the Americans simply don’t understand that concept anyways, and they’re the only player we should care. I’m very pessimistic on this front. Again I think they need another 5000 silos. Learn from Luo Ji and Russians.
What do you do with 5000 silos? “If Claude 10 ASI agent hacks Chinese military intelligence (whether directed or autonomously), we’ll nuke you”? The technology that is being built will barely even be under the control of nation states, except legally (and therefore, when it comes to true x risk and extremely rapid self-improvement, largely hypothetically). By the time the White House has identified some kind of problem (after what, Anthropic’s researchers noticed it, after it happened, after they escalate to legal, after Dario makes a sheepish call to Trump?) the really scary stuff has long happened. At that point, of course, you can still unleash the missiles, but you’re just killing millions out of spite, not to do anything. Enough GPUs will survive a nuclear apocalypse for inference anyway, even if it takes a while for new training, and there’s no telling if the CCP would be in power after reciprocation.
Well that’s to pressure the us gov to Do Something before that happened. And no you don’t have to wait until ASI to unleash the missiles, you do that before it, unless we’re talking about ASI jumping from above-human capability to godlike and build the golden dome in 30 minutes, there’s still time for it to reach the other side. That’s what the ccp called “底线思维”, bottom-line thinking. What else do you think we should do? Wait in the cuckold chair until A/ and OpenAI devours the space? I’d much, much prefer a serious negotiation between the two governments for another NPT, but 1) it does not seem like we have a serious enough us gov to negotiate with currently and 2) one of the two us frontier company is controlled by an ideologue. What we could do is to threatens to turn things into craters. Worked well for the Norks at least.
Frankly, I think both you and @DaseindustriesLtd overstate the extent of Amodei’s control over Anthropic’s day to day operations, which include alignment. He mainly interfaces with the rest of the company, according to most reporting, via his only real report, Avital Balwit, who is like 25 years old and who I doubt the grognard AI engineers spend much time obeying. Brin and Page probably exercise more direct control over (current!) Google than Amodei appears to over Anthropic.
According to most reporting, Amodei has a veritable cult at Anthropic, regularly delivers sermons, and is very concerned with ideological alignment, and I don't even think I've ever seen an Anthropic employee disagree with Dario's stances in public in the way it happens to any other US lab.
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