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Notes -
AI X-Risk Goes Mainstream?
Jacob Coxon:
116,400,000 views, 634,000 likes.
Evan Hubinger (head of alignment at Anthropic):
34,000,000 views, 51,000 likes.
None of this is substantially different from what certain AI industry insiders have been saying for 5-ish years now, but it's clear from the replies, quote-tweets, and engagement statistics that most people are hearing about this for the first time. Yes, there was clearly some coordination with friendly media prior to the announcement given the almost simultaneous WSJ article (whereas news outlets were initially reluctant to publish anything on the unexpected news of OpenAI solving a Millennium Prize Problem). One can take the maximally conspiratorial position that this is a 4D bankshot by Democrats to end tech innovation forever, but it was going to break through eventually.
In other words, Coffeezilla is now on the case.
Thank goodness for China, who has the freedom from bougie liberal moralizing, no Mouse-fueled Suffocating IP-law, and no social friction about power usage of datacenters (Building datacenters is actually a convenience for their powergrid because they produce so much excess power)
Is China not worried about X-risk? At least to prevent the US reaching ASI 6 months early, I believe they’d agree to a pause with a convincing plan to enforce it without unnoticed defectors, like nuclear treaties.
Given how they're far behind and the US is already at AGI (I think OAI's internal model that solved Navier-Stokes qualifies), what does the pause buy them? There are no monitoring systems in place, so they can't even tell if Americans are advancing further beyond, it wouldn't take a lot of compute to make large absolute gains. Even if the situation is legitimately paused here, stronger and more widely deployed American AI buys larger productivity gains, eating into their competitiveness.
I guess the talk about mutual pause assumes that they're coerced with some threat, eg of a cyberattack, because it's fundamentally an unequal treaty.
I bet they’ll agree to a pause if the US agrees to share OpenAI and Anthropic with them.
Of course right now it sounds far fetched, but that’s every pause proposal. To the doomers, ASI is an alien invasion, and at least in fiction, those seem to unite most of humanity.
Trump loves Deals, of course, but with how much the US is ahead in AI, I don't see such generosity. Besides, API access can be revoked at a whim, and the Chinese hate when you do that to them in a strategically significant domain.
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