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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.
Is that site just one big shitpost? American compute being in Mongolia - so economically dependent on China, and easily crushed by them, that they can be seen as little more than a vassal state of China - coupled with Chinese compute being in Canada - increasingly opposed to American interests, and incredibly compromised by China - will ensure cooperation? That post might as well end with "I am very smart."
This is a profoundly stupid proposal that, if enacted, would guarantee Chinese dominance in AI, barring multiple, monumental fuckups on the CCP's part.
I am once again begging Rationalists to stop "Reasoning From First Principles;" you can't just pick a couple of assumptions, construct just-so stories from these, completely fail to ask any questions like "does the world look like this?" or "are there any possible perspectives I might be missing?" and insist you did the work.
You're the one shitposting. The authors are serious people who are not in the mind for jokes. Neither am I in the mind for this bullshit. Yes, what they wrote is still politically absurd, but needy, whiny MAGA gaslighting is not really appropriate here. Take it to Lake America.
If you object to anything in my post you quoted, you provided no argument for it. Have you been asleep the past 50 years? Canada has very much defined itself as being "not America" while avoiding being in outright opposition, and the latter has been less and less true for at least the past 20 years.
To claim Canada is not compromised by Chinese interests is to deny objective reality. If Chinese compute is stationed in Canada, then America would have no hope of succesfully montoring the development of Chinese AI, and would run the risk of having to decide to take military action against a putative ally, above the objections of international partners, based on incomplete information. It's isn't just "politically absurd," it's fucking retarded; it's even dumber than GWB's cabinent convincing themselves that the Iraqis will greet us like liberators, Iraq will be a shining beacon of democracy in the Middle East, that will bring peace on Earth and goodwill toward all men. It's an idea one could only come up with if one is profoundly ignorant of political reality, while steadfastly refusing to entertain the thought of "ok, but what if I'm wrong?"
Ditto American compute in Mongolia. Bordered by two hostile regimes, economically dependent on one (Mongolian economic trade is over 75% with China, last I checked), and we'll be obligated to include Mongolians in running the facility? Are you out of your mind? We have SCIFs in South Korea and Japan, and they've compromised those, repeatedly; we won't even let Japan in Five Eyes because we know, for fact, that Communists (not the Japanese Communist Party, which is of no real threat, but Communist agents aligned with China) have completely infiltrated the government, and anything shared with Japan is de facto shared with China (N.B. this is what Trump was hinting at in his response to the reporter who asked why Japan was not given advanced notice of the attack on Iran. Telling the Japanese government when and what was going to be targetted would have been no different than passing that info to Iran directly). These are allies, who spy on us, and we accept we cannot 100% stop them, but that's fine, it's just the cost of doing business as a global hegemon. But these guys would have us set up the most important project we'll ever take in the lands of a "neutral" party, in close proximity to, and deeply entwined with, a hostile government? There's no chance in hell we could stop Mongolian contractors from getting access to sensitive information that will 100% be passed on to China. This is as good as ceding the AI race to China
If this is what counts as "Serious People discussing Serious Matters, Seriously" to you, then I frankly do not take your judgement on their merits seriously.
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