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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.
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...
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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.
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