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The future of AI is likely decided this week with Sam Altman's Congressional testimony. What do you expect?
EDIT: the recording is here.
Frankly I've tried to do my inadequate part to steer this juggernaut and don't have the energy for an effortpost (and we're having a bit too many of AI ones recently), so just a few remarks:
AI Doom narrative keeps inceasing in intensity, in zero relation to any worrying change in AI «capabilities» (indeed, with things like Claude-100K Context and StarCoder we're steadily progressing towards more useful coding and paperwork assistants at the moment, and not doing much in way of AGI; recent results seem to be negative for the LLM shoggoth/summoned demon hypothesis, which is now being hysterically peddled by e.g. these guys). Not only does Yud appear on popular podcasts and Connor Leahy turns up on MSM, but there's an extremely, conspicuously bad and inarticulate effort by big tech to defend their case. E.g. Microsoft's economist proposes we wait for meaningful harm before deciding on regulations – this is actually very sensible if we treat AI as an ordinary technology exacerbating some extant harms and bringing some benefits, but it's an insane thing to say when the public's imagination has been captured by Yuddist story of deceptive genie, and «meaningful harm» translates to eschatological imagery. Yann LeCun is being obnoxious and seemingly ignorant of the way the wind blows, though he's beginning to see. In all seriousness, top companies had to have prepared PR teams for this scenario.
Anglo-American regulatory regime will probably be more lax than that in China or the Regulatory Superpower (Europeans are, as always, the worst with regard to enterpreneural freedom), but I fear it'll mandate adherence to some onerous checklist like this one (consider this as an extraordinary case of manufacturing consensus – some literally who's «AI policy» guys come up with possible measures, a tiny subset of the queried people, also in the same until-very-recently irrelevant line of work, responds and validates them all; bam, we can say «experts are unanimous»). Same logic as with diversity requirements for Oscars – big corporations will manage it, small players won't; sliding into an indirect «compute governance» regime will be easy after that. On the other hand, MSNBC gives an anti-incumbent spin; but I don't think the regulators will interpret it this way. And direct control of AGI by USG appointees is an even worse scenario.
The USG plays favourites; on the White House meeting where Kamala Harris entered her role of AI Czar, Meta representatives weren't invited, but Anthropic's ones were. Why? How has the safety-oriented Anthropic merited their place among the leading labs, especially in a way that the government can appreciate? I assume the same ceaseless lobbying and coordinating effort that's evident in the FHI pause letter and EU's inane regulations is also active here.
Marcus is an unfathomable figure to me, and an additional cause to suspect foul play. He's unsinkable. To those who've followed the scene at all (more so to Gwern) it is clear that he's an irrelevant impostor – constantly wrong, ridiculously unapologetic, and without a single technical or conceptual result in decades; his greatest AI achievement was selling his fruitless startup to Uber, which presumably worked only because of his already-established reputation as an «expert». Look at him boast: «well-known for his challenges to contemporary AI, anticipating many of the current limitations decades in advance». He's a small man with a big sensitive ego, and I think his ego will be used to perform a convincing grilling of the evil gay billionaire tech bro Altman. Americans love pro wrestling, after all.
Americans also love to do good business. Doomers are, in a sense, living on borrowed time. Bitter academics like Marcus, spiteful artists, scared old people, Yuddites – those are all nothing before the ever-growing legion of normies using GPT-4 to make themselves more productive. Even Congress staff got to play with ChatGPT before deliberating on this matter. Perhaps this helped them see the difference between AI and demons or nuclear weapons. One can hope.
Scott has published a minor note on Paul Ehrlich the other day. Ehrlich is one of the most evil men alive, in my opinion; certainly one of those who are despised far too little, indeed he remains a respectable «expert». He was a doomer of his age, and an advocate for psyops and top-down restrictions of people's capabilities; and Yud is such a doomer of our era, and his acolytes are even more extreme in their advocacy. Both have extracted an inordinate amount of social capital from their doomerism, and received no backlash. I hope the newest crop doesn't get so far with promoting their policies.
Since when has this ever been true in anything else? Last time you said this, you based it upon some draft Chinese legislation: https://digichina.stanford.edu/work/translation-measures-for-the-management-of-generative-artificial-intelligence-services-draft-for-comment-april-2023/
Chinese companies are not known for their proclivity to 'respect intellectual property rights and commercial ethics' as this draft law proposes. Especially in a priority area like AI, why would they slow down to respect commercial ethics? It's accepted they're in a race with the US over the most important technology of the century. The US certainly thinks so, that's why they imposed their semiconductor sanctions on China.
Sure, they want to ensure AI upholds the socialist banner. But even that is much easier than having it uphold DEI. Consider the Chinese anime-fication photo app that turned blacks into furniture, monkeys, whitened them, removed them entirely because it was clearly trained that blacks weren't beautiful. That would never pass from Google, they'd get pilloried. China is antsy about Tiananmen square but the US has a huge range of 'alternative facts' about its history, which elections were rigged, the Iraq war... When it comes to lying to their own people, it's debatable about who does it more.
America has regulated its productive industries into the ground, shipbuilding, high-speed rail, construction of literally everything is strangled by red tape. They regulated semiconductors away back in the day. China embraces industry, embraces the automation of ports, embraces innovation at the cost of privacy or civil liberties.
In the US there's extensive fear of AI built into the cultural pantheon. Terminators, Matrix, Warhammer 40K, Butlerian Jihad, HAL... In China there's much more support and trust in technology generally and AI specifically: https://www.ipsos.com/en/global-opinions-about-ai-january-2022
It makes far more sense for China's AI strategy to follow their broad accelerate-economic-development strategy, while the US will delay and regulate excessively like they do with everything else. This should hold in outcomes regardless of whatever laws China or the US pass. Interpretation and enforcement matters more than pure legislation.
Like what?
I'm not American, I don't owe it to your paranoid star-sprangled hivemind to pretend that China is a thing worth paying attention to. There is no «Yellow menace», there is no «threat of Chinese eugenics»; for the world at large, China is about as relevant as Czech Republic, only quantitatively bigger. Do you want to talk about the Czech AI threat? If you want to talk about China, we can go off vibes. My read on vibes is diametrically opposite to yours. If you want to discuss the evidence, well, what is the evidence for this purported Chinese focus on AI?
Because the CCP is well-known for cutting uppity businessmen down to size, and AI to the party bosses looks like «blockchain» or «fintech» – some new grifting scheme to syphon off some of their control over the system; another invention that's a bigger internal threat than external competitive edge. Remember when Americans were afraid that Choyna, ever ruthless and game-theoretically diabolical, will leverage their dominance in cryptocurrency mining? They've gladly regulated it out of existence instead.
Yeah, it's accepted by Americans, but does China notice that they're in an AI race? For all I know they're of the mind that semiconductors are needed only for drone warfare over the first island chain, monitoring Uighur camps and manufacturing automation – or, perhaps, to produce high-end smartphones; which is why the severity of sanctions and impossibility of compromise befuddles them so. Many Americans are, indeed, obsessed with geopolitical dominance of their Empire of Freedom, like some Avengers franchise characters or, less charitably, suicidal ants willing to lay down their livelihoods for the largesse of the colony. But I don't notice the same spirit in Chinese people; they're selfish, entrepreneurial, too engrossed with busywork to notice the big picture. Does Baidu or ByteDance believe they're forging the future of the lightcone? What are the names of Chinese Hassabis or Altman? How many mainlanders are even aware of this eschatological discourse?
Ironically, the underlying model was Stable Diffusion, or specifically a minor finetune of NovelAI. Stability is incorporated in London, UK. Novel – Delaware, US. Alibaba has never released Composer. I wonder why.
Alternatively: Americans are obsessed with building, so they whine about red tape; the Chinese are obsessed with grifting, so they pretend to build. But what has China built concretely? Rail for empty trains, and empty apartment blocks? Automated ports to ship Aliexpress gizmos to the Americans? This is all immaterial in the AI race. Where are their new supercomputers? Buying out consumer GPUs? Centralized collection of annotations to train foundation models, incentivized with Social Credit score (does it even work yet)? They have many levers to compensate for their hardware and expertise shortcomings. Which ones, exactly, have they pressed? They've only ever gone in the opposite direction – prohibiting tech giants from harvesting data, imposing regulations, forgoing opportunities.
They'd rather take an unsustainable loan, erect another concrete dildo, stuff it with pigs and Huawei snout recognition and pat themselves on the back for being innovative. All the while some pig-like official collects gold bricks in the basement of his overpriced siheyuan in the countryside. That's what Chinese building is like.
I may sound a little racist here. But the bigger issue is that Mainland China is so incredibly sheltered. They don't have the sense of what is possible, their culture is a tiny shallow hothouse for midwit takes. It's like Belarus or some other stale post-Soviet backwater; actually worse. This is true of their entertainment as well as of their tech and politics. I've tried to take them seriously for a while, and came to this conclusion. Ignoring China and assuming they won't do anything consequential nor retaliate in any meaningful way when Anglos are kicking them in the balls has consistently been the rational choice.
They've curtailed this strategy though, now it's about «the struggle for security» or something. Not like it'll work.
Firstly, I'm not even American. Secondly, AI is a major priority for China. From a conference chaired by Xi himself:
and
I don't know about future of the lightcone but there are leading voices who see AI as critical to China's status as a world power. They've spent enormous sums on developing domestic semiconductor industries. AI training can be brute-forced with trailing-edge chips at the price of higher capital costs and power costs. China has no shortage of either and they have an enormous amount of trailing edge wafer production.
If so, shouldn't the US be able to recruit enough soldiers to meet army and navy recruiting goals? They can't: https://money.yahoo.com/us-army-could-see-cuts-201023045.html
If the Empire of Freedom is so powerful, it should be capable of finding soldiers to fight for it.
Their rail works and actually generates returns, per the World Bank. US rail is best known for not being built and wasting money in the case of California's HSR. In Los Angeles, train stations are very popular amongst drug addicts, where they imbibe (probably Chinese-sourced) fentanyl and make a nuisance of themselves, at great expense to the public who refuse to use the mobile drug dens but are stuck paying for their bloated, ineffective policing and inflated construction costs.
Well they finished Tianhe-3 back in 2021 and they apparently have another exascale supercomputer, though there's some level of secrecy in what they're doing. Fair enough, given they don't want to stand out and get any more sanctions.
They've been buying American servertime because the sanctions apparatus is too dopey to prevent banned Chinese companies renting their GPUs for AI training or selling 'banned' components to intermediaries: https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ft.com%2Fcontent%2F9706c917-6440-4fa9-b588-b18fbc1503b9
What about 'biding our time', the strategy they used so effectively while the US flailed around wrecking the Middle East? Instead of being baited, they wait until the balance of power favours them most, then strike. It's a strategy that's paying off. The US now has a significant chunk of its strength tied down in Eastern Europe and Ukraine. You laugh but those MANPADs and ATGMs would be useful to have defending Taipei, which is certainly relevant to an AI arms race. The US has sent yet more troops to Europe due to the war in Ukraine, along with a fair few F-35s. South Korea is also within striking range of the PLA and the country's fate is effectively tied to Taiwan and the First Island Chain. Their food and fuel self-sufficiency is laughable. In one campaign China could destroy or deny the bulk of the world's chip production to the West.
It's a rational choice to taunt and abuse random people, right up until they drive up to your office building with a killdozer and raze it. They've been building a giant fleet, while the USN is dispersed, weakened by poor training and actively shrinking as they discard expensive, useless garbage like the LCS.
You can assume that someone is a coward if they don't strike back when you provoke them but they could also be waiting for the best opportunity. Likewise, if somebody isn't proudly proclaiming their progress, perhaps they have made little. Or perhaps they're concealing what they've achieved so as not to draw attention.
So China is sort of a big place. With a bit of effort you can dig evidence in any direction: that China is democratic, that China is woke, that China has a problem with murderous cardiologists, that China
But then:
and of course
What I've learned is that Westerners can reliably dig up some random impressively-sounding titles and half-bullshit Orientalist translations demonstrating some grandiose coordinated Chinese agenda, and yet nothing. ever. happens. The Chinese nation does not have the capacity to act in its rational self-interest. The half that's not bullshit is mostly big character posters and interests of individual powerless weirdoes.
The director of the Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence argues AGI is an all-important topic? You don't say.
Why not bold it like that instead? By the way you can listen the Congressional discussion and dig some much more ambitious quotes. Including «even if we pause to prevent risks, Choyna won't». Can you imagine Xi saying «we shouldn't focus too much on risks of AGI progress, because Americans won't»? I can't.
And did Xi talk to their equivalent of Sam Altman? Or is this just impotent political sloganeering into vacuum, one more conference among hundreds – about agriculture, climate change, real estate, football?
Yes, but what does this matter for AI? Do you have any evidence that they prioritize AI work with those trailing edge chips?
I think they're straight up going to plug them in Xiaomi robot vacuums and those atrocious barking dog toys. This is what the challenger to American hegemony looks like.
Americans have always been subpar in direct combat and prevailed through air and artillery advantage, so this doesn't matter, especially in this age.
This is normie shit for oil and gas exploration. Where are their AI supercomputers? Yeah, you're right: they use AWS. Do you suppose relying on regulators being «dopey» is a clever move? No, it's desperation. And they don't train anything of strategic importance in any case. It's more commercial and surveillance gimmicks, boring dystopia infrastructure, not AGI.
Elon fucking Musk has over 1 exaFLOPS of DL-relevant performance on a single pod. Google sports 4-exaFLOPS tier pods. God knows what Gemini is being trained on. By 2025, Americans will reach zettascale. Again, China is as relevant as the Czech Republic.
A nice cope, I suppose. One a Kung Fu sage could come up with in the MMA cage.
They'll keep biding their time, while Americans eat their lunch, their supper, their dinner and their nation.
Yes, excuse me but I'll laugh. Taiwan is a red herring, Americans can nuke the whole island just to be sure nothing goes to PRC, and it's impossible to defend TSMC anyway; if the invasion starts, fabs go down.
AGI can be completed with already available hardware, and the US-led bloc has like 95% of it, and total control over means of production. Intel has many 10nm-capable fabs and will have 5nm by 2025. China will maybe have 7nm in 2030 or something, if they don't implode first from overregulating pork, or a housing bubble, or some other absurd problem.
A very Chinese strategy: build a massive junk fleet for the era of robot wars. Have you seen their exercises? Such moving choreography.
Or perhaps they want you to think that, so you're too wary to deliver the finishing blow.
Or perhaps they're just too busy to think about any of this, preoccupied with their small mercantile interests, unchanged in millenia, while the West rushes into posthuman Singularity.
You have to understand I hoped it won't be like this. I hoped that if not my own country, then China will be able to provide a second pole. I wanted to have a minimally livable refuge from GAE, somewhere on the outskirts of Chinese project – in some African mineral supplier or in Thailand, whatever. But that depended on China not squandering this decade. Not shooting themselves in the foot. Not being cartoon villains. Being actually rational.
But that wasn't their role.
I'm not saying China is a perfect state. The One-Child Policy was a bad move, amongst other things. But in a great many fields, they do better than the US does. There is a level of comprehensive strength and cohesion they have that the US lacks.
Unlike the blatherings of US elected officials, (one of which started a diplomatic furor by threatening to blow up TSMC in scorched earth policy as you linked, which is not helpful to the US) Xi knows that officials are forced to pick over everything he says with a fine-toothed comb if they want to get ahead. Everything he says is super super bland and dull-sounding but it's never into the vacuum. Xi Xinping Thought is big and important in Chinese officialdom, just as Biden 'Thought' is laughable in America and routinely corrected by officials. Xi consistently says the time for struggle is near, we must be resolute, train more soldiers, prepare for confrontation. That's what the fleet, air and rockets are for. Why is Xi's China building such a gigantic fleet if not to challenge the US? If he wanted just to defend Fortress China, he could just stack up ICBMs, land-based missiles and SAMs.
Well by this logic, Russia can just nuke the US tech sector to ash. Sarmat and Topol can fulfil their destiny, do what they were made to do. If nukes are on the table, then that radically evens the playing field. In a scenario where megadeaths are locked in, why not have a full exchange?
According to Reuters, CHina can shrug off US AI sanctions using the dumbed-down US H-800s, theft and smuggling. The US is terminally dopey. They don't learn from their mistakes. Do you think Kamala Harris is going to lay down some really effective, well-thought out AI policy? Her presence reveals a level of unseriousness - she was previously supposed to be border czar where she did next to nothing to defend US national interests.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/chinas-ai-industry-barely-slowed-by-us-chip-export-rules-2023-05-03
They overwhelmed their enemies with industrial output. Now they face China. Anyway, my point was that if the US is so united and committed, they should be able to put boots in the ground.
Well you asked for supercomputers, I gave you supercomputers! How can China be capable of putting together a FP 64 supercomputer on par with the US but not FP 16? Everyone agrees that they have first-rate chip design skills. They designed a TPU-equivalent back in 2018: https://www.networkworld.com/article/3289387/baidu-takes-a-major-leap-as-an-ai-player-with-new-chip-intel-alliance.html
Now I can't find out what exactly came of these chips, I can't read mandarin and China doesn't have a habit of announcing everything they do for foreign audiences like the US does. (America's previous plan to undermine CCP rule by economic liberalization and free trade failed for precisely that ludicrous, anime-tier insistence on declaring how their attack works, as they use it in battle). You're free to say that it's a nothingburger, another dancing robot puppy. I will say that something's powering Tiktok, which is a truly impressive soft-power/adversary cultural degradation tool. Profitable too. Nobody seems to know where they trained and refined their algorithm but it's still important.
How much division and conflict in the West has it's root in Tiktok? Libsoftiktok, those abhorrent social media trends, shortening attention spans of the youth. Where is the US equivalent, if they're so far ahead in AI? Now I sense you'll think of me a strident boomer, maniacally warning against the evil Chicoms corrupting the youth. Well, it's still true. Fentanyl and Tiktok are corrupting Western society, though it's like pissing into an ocean of piss at this point. Shouldn't we expect the leading power in AI to get to these things first? Shouldn't there be some American Tiktok-equivalent that can make patriotism really cool, get kids into STEM, make it fun to hate China? The US is still doing analogue stuff like NAFO and brigading reddit, stuff that can't even pierce the Great Firewall. And why can't the US make anything superior to Huawei's 5G on cost-efficiency? That's not AI but it's AI-adjacent.
Why can't the US produce commercially valuable products if they're so far ahead? Sure, ChatGPT is coming online now but there are Chinese equivalents, multimodal too (though I'm not willing to pay for Chinatalk's substack to see. This looks fairly decent, especially the trick question noticing stuff: https://www.chinatalk.media/p/baidus-ernie-china-reacts ). If they're just leveraging the huge amount of Chinese data they've sucked up to counter their crappier hardware, then so be it. That works too.
Now I'm not saying the US is behind China, just that it's close enough for the conflict to be interesting.
Well, at the cost of trillions of dollars and about 130,000 US veteran suicides plus a good chunk America's global reputation, what was the outcome of the Middle East Wars 2001-2023? Iraq and Yemen are now in the Iranian sphere of influence, by extension they're in the Chinese sphere. Saudi is flirting with Beijing, Russia is now wedded at the hip. Maybe if US diplomats studied Daoism and practiced a little inaction, they'd have saved blood, prestige and treasure while getting a much better outcome. The Chinese sage spent over a decade building up strength while the musclebound MMA thug bashed his head into the wall. This is what skilful diplomacy looks like, cheap victories over expensive losses.
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