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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 1, 2023

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The Chinese policy paper you mention:

Respect intellectual property rights and commercial ethics; advantages in algorithms, data, platforms, etc., may not be used to engage in unfair competition.

Since when has China respected commercial ethics or intellectual property rights? This is the flimsiest fig-leaf since that US-China cybersecurity summit Barack Obama signed, which China immediately ignored and continued as usual, hacking as they please. It's a draft law in a country where laws aren't meaningfully obeyed and party priorities come first. AI is a significant priority.

Putin, too, could've been building GPU clusters Yud suggests must be bombed. Instead he preemptively bombed Mariupol.

Did Russia ever have the talent, state capacity and wealth to compete in AI? Maybe talent but there's been a lot of brain drain. Nuclear missiles are Russia's comparative advantage, not advanced technology. Putin could still put an end to US AI development, maybe he or someone else will finally grow a pair and shoot a hostile singleton while it's still in the womb.

Importantly they face no credible opposition – LeCun spews condescending inarticulate nonsense and doesn't call Yud out on his subtle technical misstatements; and the non-technical folks just accept the Terminator imagery because why not, it's intuitive!

What concrete goal has Yud and co achieved? They've raised awareness but what has that translated into? The six month pause they proposed has had no effect, Altman didn't sign it, nor did LeCun or anyone in any leading position. LeCun has 4x Yud's follower count on twitter, the nonsense he promulgates is easily more influential. Plus he has credentials and prestige and can smeer Yud for being a mildly successful fanfiction author. Who is the idiot boomer govt official going to find more credible? The Professor at NYU, Chief AI Scientist at Meta? Or a fellow who wrote a weird BDSM-MMT fantasy novel (that I made the dire mistake of reading)?