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When I was a kid and my father taught me how to play chess, the most useful lesson was this: "remember, in chess there are turns - after each of your turns, the opponent gets to do his. If you have a plan which only accounts for your side, it's going to survive for about one turn". I am quite mediocre chess player, but most of what I can play, I owe mostly to this lesson. Somehow, when developing Galaxy-brain size plans, people completely forget they are not the only actors and think everybody else is an NPC that would sit and wait until activated by their plan, and then act exactly in a way their plan needs them to. It is not so.
Making compute platforms a very rare and insanely prized resource would create an opportunity to profit by producing them. Of course, the bootleg ones would be of inferior quality, unreliable and extremely expensive. But if it would mean for India getting advantage over Pakistan - or vice versa - and not just some small advantage, but superpower-sized advantage - they'd do it, whatever it costs. They'd bribe whoever needs to be bribed, steal whatever needs to be stolen and spend as much as will need to be spent (and murder if somebody would need to be murdered, have no doubt about it). When we're in cooperation mode, of course it's much easier and cheaper to buy this stuff. But this leads to a dangerous illusion where you think that since everybody is buying the stuff from you, you're in control of everything. This is a common mistake, most recently made by one Vladimir Putin, for example.
In truth, if cooperation breaks down, there are always alternatives. Inferior, more expensive, less pleasant - but they exist, and they will be used if the preferred venue is no longer available. If the US would go to war with the world over AI, the world would learn to live without the US, and the AI will still be created - assuming, of course, current road indeed leads to AI creation. Maybe 20 years later, and maybe it will speak Chinese or Hindi - not sure how it's better - but saying "everybody will bend to my will because I have this MacGuffin" rarely works. People will find a way around, if the incentive is large enough - and if the claims of the alarmists are true, the incentive here is nearly infinite.
China tried to buy and bribe and coerce and woo people who could enable them to produce competitive hardware. They started in the cooperation era already. They dedicated over a trillion to the task. It took them decades to admit failure, and new American sanctions are mopping up their silly projects.
Iran tried to catch up to a century-old technology to secure what it perceives as its existential interests, and still tries, and fails, and will fail in the future.
The logic that the opponent will get what is necessary for him to get amounts to magical thinking. Incentives do not magically transform into actualized successes. Yes, your opponent will make moves, but if you have decisive advantage, you will still be able to thwart them.
And some «bootlegs» are bad enough to not matter. Hesbollah has pipe rockets. Israel ballistic missiles and Iron Dome. It is impossible for Hesbollah to do crippling damage to their enemies with what they have, even if they literally sacrifice all of their members for it. With next-gen AI accelerators, it's not very different. At some point in the not-too-distant future, training runs affordable to Google and Microsoft and Department of Energy will require gigawatts of power supply and a small beach's worth of silicon in conventional hardware, with no time to build either.
That's assuming there even is insubordination. China bought muh overpopulation, China recognizes climate change, China pioneered Covid overreaction, China will possibly adopt extreme Yuddist position for AI )once somebody makes a convincing enough Xinnie Pooh animation with a diffusion model). Other bad guys aren't even playing.
The world would lose. Likely will. Luckily for Americans, most parts of the world that matter will submit to their moral authority even without that Herculean undertaking.
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