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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.
There are no datacenters worth bombing in China yet (bombing is a scary escalation move), and the whole idea is to achieve sufficient advantage that none become worth it. The Chinese are, let's say, not close to developing AGI first. At this rate it is not guaranteed that they'll ever achieve it. I've been looking at what Astra can do for a few hours now; the US has just become a lot more militarily capable, and this advantage will compound in a matter of weeks, not even months. Anthropic is obviously also not showing all cards. I truly wonder if the Chinese officials can even comprehend how disadvantaged they now are and how thin the ice is.
The US has a vast bureaucracy preoccupied with all sorts of small agendas and concerns of their constituencies/lobbyists. What does it matter? If there were no concern about Chinese AI, a smuggled B300 server in Hong Kong wouldn't cost like 4x its Western market price.
This just isn't interesting. Perhaps Anthropic could crack down harder on transfer stations, but meh. What is the point, just making the Chinese marginally less productive? They do what can be done to curb distillation without disrupting legitimate business. He even says repeatedly that the benefits of technology – but not its power – should be distributed widely.
For the record, Claude spontaneously writes insecure code for Russians, when it can clock them. So this service provision is already likely poisoned.
the export block that threatened to lock out half his staff (heavily European/Anglosphere immigrants)?
I am not sure if there remain many PRC citizens working in Anthropic, and I'm sure none have access to important details. Racially discriminating against US citizens is a bit too rich an ask. Far as I know they do background checks. Can you name your favorite Chinese person at Anthropic? Plenty of Han faces at OpenAI.
I understand that you feel insulted, but I think my "tea leaves" are just the most parsimonious, perhaps boring reading of the situation. Amodei's actions are perfectly consistent with his words and you're grasping at rhetorical straws. He's no more kidding about Chyna than he was kidding about the utility of scaling Transformer to AGI since 2017. This is a man who tries to seriously think about "exponentials" and update to the limit, exactly as Yud would advise, exactly as his subculture prescribes, as Leopold (married to Avital Balwit now btw) does… It'd be weird for him to be any other way. I'm out of charitable explanations for your aversion to this straightforward idea.
Putnam HM. He's pretty sharp, could be a quant. Maybe 160 IQ or so. There is a decent number of even smarter people in the US, so what? Though I admit I find his technical bets and execution more impressive than muh Ph.D. Plenty of Ph.Ds who still don't even believe in deep learning.
I don't think you understand that scaling is an unsolved scientific problem, not a matter of executing a python script. It's plausible that nobody on the planet knows how to really train a 20T model and not get slop or collapse, but the people closest to knowing are all at Anthropic. We don't have visibility into their internal IP, and that IP is downstream of Dario's technical bets. Even alignment stuff is good recruitment pitch for research into training dynamics. I believe they're well ahead of OpenAI on the science of pretraining, and scarily ahead of others. Sure, not his scripts, he's not Liang Wenfeng to deign to do the grunt work alongside his lessers, perhaps even chinks. Again, what does it matter? You're talking like he's some nepo baby who found Anthropic in his trust fund.
amusing if Dario is a mere sockpuppet for Camilla Clark, but that'd just mean you're underestimating Camilla instead.
Come on now. So he's a wordcel, but not even a good wordcel? It's "right rooms" all the way down? How did she pick the rooms that get you a Fable? I watch this very intently, and there is currently only one organization that can seriously compete with Anthropic on peak model intelligence. It's called OpenAI. Sam also doesn't strike me as a talented orator. I think he's just a culturally impoverished semi-autist with the standard shitty rationalist taste, and a touch of condescension to the listeners and electorate. Not unlike your own. Do you lecture cab drivers in the manner of this post?
oh boy, Dwarkesh-Stalin would go so hard. It'd blow your mind.
What are we doing here? If a fancy manner of speech were what makes one a significant actor, I'd have had a startup worth hundreds of billions too. But alas, that's a pretty useless perk. Top doers are not necessarily top orators. Speaking of, how do you like Musk's manner of speech and overall public conduct? Doesn't exactly scream "Earth-Space traffic monopolist and the Czar of American Industry». And yet.
You know perfectly well this wasn't about China. For fuck's sake, they killed Khamenei's family precisely the next day.
Claude research how to topple the CCP, make no mistakes. Would do way better than your snark .
Dario would of course much prefer if the state throttles China without blood on his hands.
The Chinese problem is with what Dario means as the head of American private AGI research, not so much his own vendetta.
Dario's strategy, to me. makes great sense. AGI comes first.
I don’t think all the personal insults were necessary. You have been around here long enough that you have been very, very wrong many, many times. And right sometimes. So have I. The posts are mostly still there. Neither of us have exceptional predictive ability, I am humble enough to admit that. I don’t lecture cab drivers, even when they tell me to buy shitcoins at the peak (or gold, as they did earlier this year).
Here is my summary of the argument so far. I make a point that while Dario might be a San Francisco EA liberal who would like China to become a kumbaya liberal democracy like California, I don’t think he’s a zealot, I don’t think he’s willing to die to fight China, and I don’t think his revealed preferences, words or actions suggest someone for whom the above is the case. You argue, based on his statements, some quotes etc, that he hates the Chinese government, the CCP, and Chinese institutions, seeks their overthrow, and believes he has or will shortly has the means to do so, and that he is willing to do whatever it takes to execute, and that this probably makes him (you imply, but don’t state, to be fair) the most dangerous person in the world to the Chinese.
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Huh, is there some story behind this? My impression was that it writes insecure code for most everyone unless handheld/corrected.
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