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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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