I've been wrong, again, pooh-poohing another Eurasian autocracy. Or so it seems.
On 29 August 2023, to great jubilation of Chinese netizens («the light boat has passed through a thousand mountains!», they cry), Huawei has announced Mate 60 and 60 Pro; the formal launch is scheduled for September 25th, commemorating the second anniversary of return of Meng Wanzhou, CFO and daughter of Huawei's founder, from her detainment in Canada. Those are nice phones of course but, specs-wise, unimpressive, as far as flagships in late 2023 go (on benchmarks, score like 50-60% of the latest iPhone while burning peak 13W so 200% of power). Now they're joined by Mate X5.
The point, however, is that they utilize Huawei's own SoC, Hisilicon Kirin 9000S, not only designed but produced in the Mainland; it even uses custom cores that inherit simultaneous multithreading from their server line (I recommend this excellent video review, also this benchmarking). Their provenance is not advertised, in fact it's not admitted at all, but now all reasonable people are in agreement that it's SMIC-Shanghai made, using their N+2 (7nm) process, with actual minimum metal pitch around 42 nm, energy efficiency at low frequencies close to Samsung's 4nm and far worse at high (overall capability in the Snapdragon 888 range, so 2020), transistor density on par with first-gen TSMC N7, maybe N7P (I'm not sure though, might well be 10% higher)… so on the border of what has been achieved with DUV (deep ultraviolet) and early EUV runs (EUV technology having been denied to China. As a side note, Huawei is also accused of building its own secret fabs).
It's also worse on net than Kirin 9000, their all-time peak achievement taped out across the strait in 2020, but it's… competitive. They apparently use self-aligned quad patterning, a DUV variant that's as finicky as it sounds, an absurd attempt to cheat optics and etch features many times smaller than the etching photons' wavelength (certain madmen went as high as 6x patterning; that said, even basic single-patterning EUV is insane and finicky, «physics experiment, not a production process»; companies on the level of Nikon exited the market in exasperation rather than pursue it; and it'll get worse). This trick was pioneered by Intel (which has failed at adopting EUV, afaik it's a fascinating corporate mismanagement story with as much strategic error as simple asshole behavior of individual executives) and is still responsible for their latest chips, though will be made obsolete in the next generations (the current node used to be called Intel's 10 nm Enhanced SuperFin, and was recently rebranded to Intel 7; note, however, that Kirin 9000S is a low-power part and requirements there are a bit more lax than in desktop/server processors). Long story short: it's 1.5-2 generations, 3-4 years behind the frontier of available devices, 5-6 years behind frontier production runs, 7-8 years after the first machines to make such chips at scale came onto market; but things weren't that much worse back then. We are, after all, in the domain of diminishing returns.
Here are the highlights from the first serious investigation, here are some leaks from it, here's the nice Asianometry overview (esp 3:50+), and the exhilarating, if breathlessly hawkish perspective of Dylan Patel, complete with detailed restrictions-tightening advice. Summarizing:
- This is possible because sanctions against China have tons of loopholes, and because ASML and other suppliers are not interested in sacrificing their business to American ambition. *
- Yes, it qualifies for 7nm in terms of critical dimensions. Yes, it's not Potemkin tulou, they likely have passable yields, both catastrophic and parametric (maybe upwards of 50% for this SoC, because low variance in stress-testing means they didn't feel the need to approve barely-functional chips, meaning there weren't too many defects) and so it's economically sustainable (might be better in that sense than e.g. Samsung's "5nm" or "4nm", because Samsung rots alive due to systemic management fraud) [I admit I doubt this point, and Dylan is known to be a hawk with motivated reasoning]. Based on known capex, they will soon be able to produce 30K wafers per month, which means 10s of millions of such chips soon (corroborated by shipment targets; concretely it's like 300 Kirins *29700 wafers so 8.9M/month, but the cycle is>1 month). And yes, they will scale it up further, and indeed they will keep polishing this tech tree and plausibly get to commercially viable "5nm" next - «the total process cost would only be ≈20% higher versus a 5nm that utilizes EUV» (probably 50%+ though).
- But more importantly: «Even with 50% yields, 30,000 WPM could support over 10 million Nvidia H100 GPU ASIC dies a year […] Remember GPT-4 was trained on ≈24,000 A100’s and Open AI will still have less than 1 million advanced GPUs even by the end of next year». Of course, Huawei already had been producing competitive DL accelerators back when they had access to EUV 7nm; even now I stumble upon ML papers that mention using those.
- As if all that were not enough, China simply keeps splurging billions on pretty good ML-optimized hardware, like Nvidia A/H800s, which abide with the current (toothless, as Patel argues) restrictions.
- But once again: on a bright (for Westerners) side, this means it's not so much Chinese ingenuity and industriousness (for example, they still haven't delivered a single ≤28nm lithography machine, though it's not clear if the one they're working on won't be rapidly upgraded for 20, 14, 10 and ultimately 7nm processes – after all, SMIC is currently procuring tools for «28nm», complying with sanctions, yet here we are), as it's the unpicked low-hanging fruit of trade restrictions. In fact, some Chinese doomers argue it's a specific allowance by the US Department of Commerce and overall a nothingburger, ie doesn't suggest willingness to produce more consequential things than gadgets for patriotic consumers. The usual suspects (Zeihan and his flock) take another view and smugly claim that China has once again shot itself in the foot while showing off, paper tiger, wolf warriors, only steals and copies etc.; and, the stated objective of the USG being «as large of a lead as possible», new crippling sanctions are inevitable (maybe from Patel's list). There exists a body of scholarship on semiconductor supply chain chokepoints which confirms these folks are not delusional – something as «simple» as high-end photoresist is currently beyond Chinese grasp, so the US can make use of a hefty stick.
All that being said, China does advance in on-shoring the supply chain: EDA, 28nm scanners, wafers etc.
* Note: Patel plays fast and loose with how many lithography machines exactly, and of what capacity, are delivered/serviced/ordered/shipping/planned/allowed, and it's the murkiest part in the whole narrative; for example he describes ASML's race-traitorous plans stretching to 2025-2030, but the Dutch and also the Japanese seem to already have began limiting sales of tools he lists as unwisely left unbanned, and so the August surge or imports may have been the last, and certainly most 2024+ sales are off the table I think.
All of this is a retreading of a discussion from over a year ago, when a less mature version of SMIC N7 process was used - also surreptitiously – for a Bitcoin mining ASIC, a simple, obscenely high-margin part 19.3mm² in size, which presumably would have been profitable to make even at pathetic yields, like 10%; the process back then was near-idential to TSMC N7 circa 2018-2019. 9000S is 107 mm² and lower-margin. Nvidia GH100, the new workhorse of cutting edge ML, made with 4nm TSMC node, is 814 mm²; as GPU chips are a strategic resource, it'd be sensible to subsidize their production (as it happens, H100 with its 98 MTr/mm² must be equally or a bit less dense than 9000S; A100, a perfectly adequate 7nm downgrade option, is at 65 MTr/mm² so we can be sure they'll be capable of making those, eg resurrecting Biren BR100 GPUs or things like Ascend 910). Citing Patel again, «Just like Apple is the guinea pig for TSMC process nodes and helps them ramp and achieve high yield, Huawei will likewise help SMIC in the same way […] In two years, SMIC will likely be able to produce large monolithic dies for AI and networking applications.» (In an aside, Patel laments the relative lack of gusto in strangling Chinese radio/sensor capabilities, which are more formidable and immediately scary than all that compute. However, this makes sense if we look at the ongoing chip trade war through the historical lens, with the reasonable objective being Chinese obsolescence a la what happened to the Soviet Union and its microelectronics, and arguably even Japan in the 80s, which is why ASML/Samsung/TSMC are on the map at all; Choyna military threat per se, except to Taiwan, being a distant second thought, if not a total pretext. This r/LessCredibleDefense discussion may be of interest).
So. I have also pooh-poohed the Chinese result back then, assuming that tiny crypto ASICs are as good as they will get within the bounds assigned to them, «swan song of Chinese industry», and won't achieve meaningful yields. Just as gwern de facto did in October 2022, predicting the slow death of Chinese industry in view of «Export Controls on Advanced Computing and Semiconductor Manufacturing Items to the PRC» (even mentioning the yellow bear meme). Just as I did again 4 months ago, saying to @RandomRanger «China will maybe have 7nm in 2030 or something». I maintain that it's plausible they won't have a fully indigenized supply chain for any 7nm process until 2030 (and/or will likewise fail with securing chains for necessary components other than processors: HBM, interposers etc), they may well fall below the capacity they have right now (reminder that not only do scanners break down and need consumables, but they can be remotely disabled), especially if restrictions keep ramping up and they'll keep making stupid errors, e.g. actually starting and failing an attempt at annexing Taiwan, or going for Cultural Revolution Round II: Zero Covid Boogaloo, or provoking an insurgency by force-feeding all primary school students gutter oil breakfasts… with absolute power, the possibilities are endless! My dissmissal was informed not by prejudice but years upon years of promises by Chinese industry and academia representatives to get to 7nm in 2 more weeks, and consistent failure and high-profile fraud (and in fact I found persuasive this dude's argument that by some non-absurd measures the gap has widened since the Mao's era; and there was all the graphene/quantum computing "leapfrogging" nonsense, and so on). Their actors haven't become appreciably better now.
But I won't pooh-pooh any more, because their chips have become better. I also have said: «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». This is still technically true but apparently not in a decisive way. History is still likely to repeat – that is, like the Qing China during the Industrial Revolution, like the Soviet Union in the transistor era, the nation playing catch-up will once again run into trade restrictions, fail at the domestic fundamental innovation and miss out on the new technological stage; but it is not set in stone. Hell, they may even get to EUV through that asinine 160m synchrotron-based electron beam thing – I mean, they are trying, though it still looks like ever more academic grift… but…
I have underestimated China and overestimated the West. Mea culpa. Alphanumericsprawl and others were making good points.
Where does this leave us?
It leaves us in the uncomfortable situation where China as a rival superpower will plausibly have to be defeated for real, rather then just sanctioned away or allowed to bog itself down in imperialist adventurism and incompetence. They'll have enough suitable chips, they have passable software, enough talent for 1-3 frontier companies, reams of data and their characteristically awkward ruthlessness applied to refining it (and as we've learned recently, high-quality data can compensate for a great disparity in compute). They are already running a few serious almost-OpenAI-level projects – Baidu's ERNIE, Alibaba's Tongyi Qianwen (maybe I've mentioned it already, but their Qwen-7B/VL are really good; seems like all groups in the race were obligated to release a small model for testing purposes), maybe also Tsinghua's ChatGLM, SenseTime etc.'s InternLM and smaller ones. They – well, those groups, not the red boomer Xi – are well aware of their weaknesses and optimize around them (and borrowing from the open academic culture helps, as can be often seen in the training methods section – thanks to MIT&Meta, Microsoft, Princeton et al). They are preparing for the era of machine labor, which for now is sold as means to take care of the aging population and so on (I particularly like the Fourier Intelligence's trajectory, a near-perfect inversion of Iron Man's plot – start with the medical exoskeleton, proceed to make a full humanoid; but there are other humanoids developed in parallel, eg Unitree H1, and they seem competitive with their American equivalents like Tesla Optimus, X1 Neo and so on); in general, they are not being maximally stupid with their chances.
And this, in turn, means that the culture of the next years will be – as I've predicted in Viewpoint Focus 3 years ago – likely dominated by the standoff, leading up to much more bitter economic decoupling and kinetic war; promoting bipartisan jingoism and leaving less space for «culture war» as understood here; on the upside, it'll diminish the salience of progressive campaigns that demoralize the more traditionally minded population.
It'll also presumably mean less focus on «regulation of AI risks» than some would hope for, denying this topic the uncontested succession to the Current Thing №1.
That's about all from me, thoughts?
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Notes -
Well, I'm happy to be acknowledged! I read Patel on the day it came out, I suspect we follow the same substacks.
I think the fundamental issue with Western technology sanctions (and everything else) is a lack of seriousness. The whole time, Chinese companies have been renting compute from top-tier, banned chips overseas. Apparently its been too hard to stop shell companies doing this. Only recently did the US slap chip restrictions on Middle Eastern countries, knowing they'll sell them on to China. There's a flourishing black market in chips, plus all of the Chinese APTs who can steal IP. Much of the Western hawkishness on Chinese sanctions is not without cause, what we've been doing is ineffective. From a pure balance of power calculation, in the past we should've been trying to bring conflict forward, since our relative strength was declining. But now?
China's always had a lot of brainpower and hard work, observe the physiognomy of Western scientific/maths Olympiad teams. Observe the names of people publishing AI papers. Lian, Guo, Li, Tan, Song... I don't know if Alexander Kruel's highlighted arxiv papers have a bias towards Chinese authors but it seems undeniable that China has a lot of talent. Whatever number of Chinese diaspora we have in the West doing research, it stands to reason there are more in China. We were never going to retain a large technological edge against such a rich and populous country. China is bigger than Western civilization, they have a larger labour force than all of us combined!
However, I go a step further than the hawks and think it's too late to try and suppress China intensely. We should not make a bluff from a weak hand. The same level of unseriousness we see in chip sanctions, we also see in the Arizona semiconductor plant, should it ever open. There have been all kinds of problems with skilled labour shortages, Taiwanese engineers being frustrated by how slack the American workers are, regulatory issues, random thugs breaking into their cars...
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/07/tsmc-delays-us-chip-fab-opening-says-us-talent-is-insufficient/
And Arizona still needs Taiwanese advanced packaging: https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/4996624
Unseriousness is a pervasive and all-encompassing fog in the West. The US Navy is shrinking, just at the time when strength is needed most and it's not even at war! Why is it that chip production left the US in the first place? Why are Taiwanese engineers having to come over to get things back on track? Why is US politics led by geriatrics - Putin and Xi are 'only' 70 year olds to Biden's 80. Why is government debt so high, why can't anyone in the West seem to build warships or anything quickly? Why is the US military so demoralized and disorganized, why can't they fill their ranks? Why is there a huge race spoils program undermining meritocracy across the economy and in the US or UK military (I know of examples in the air force of both countries)? Political/racial division in the US is huge and often a bad sign for one's chances on the battlefield. As for diplomacy - wtf has been happening? Why were there Russian and Chinese troops invited to Mexico's independence day??? Can the US not even keep Mexico under control?
China now has a credible nuclear triad, they have a very large, modern and concentrated navy poised to dominate the approaches to Taiwan, South Korea and maybe Japan. They have the world's biggest economy in PPP terms and in manufacturing, whatever figures you use. It would surprise me greatly if Chinese war industry chokes under the strain of a medium/high intensity war like NATO has in Ukraine - they probably can spool up production of millions and millions of shells very quickly, fill the skies with drones and missiles. China is in a position of strength, while we are in a position of weakness. There are some things that we can't buy even with huge amounts of paper money - quick construction, discipline, efficient organizations, large pools of highly-skilled labour whether that's in semiconductor fab construction, warships or shipyards.
If we fight now or in the near future I believe there is a high chance of defeat and that brings the whole house of cards down. If we lose a war and they get AGI... we're so fucked. Thus, we need to avoid fighting until our domestic problems are solved, which will take many years if it's doable at all. Bully the weak and appease the strong, not the other way around! Fix the deficits, crime, drugs, fill out our militaries, find young leaders, recreate national unity, end race-grifting, streamline regulations, fill up the arsenals, secure spheres of influence and then fight.
As for AGI, its a bit like a game of musical chairs. We don't know when the game ends and should be prepared for near-term or the long-term scenarios (10-15 years). Just don't get knocked out of the competition by losing a war.
No. The USA has way more nukes and better ability to deliver them. The PRC's not catching up that fast.
A full nuclear exchange would certainly bring down the house of cards! It's possible that Russia joins in and anyway, China has more than you'd think (mostly because Minutemen are de-MIRVed):
https://www.defensenews.com/congress/2022/12/07/china-may-have-surpassed-us-in-number-of-nuclear-warheads-on-icbms/
I was assuming a conventional defeat in Asia, resulting in China securing control over Taiwan and much of the Pacific. The damage to the West would be catastrophic, we wouldn't be world leaders anymore. South Korea would probably find some accommodation with China since they're surrounded and food insecure (maybe Japan too). China would have many more friends, our 'friends' in the Middle East would jump ship, nobody would want to buy our debt anymore, the Washington based finance/banking system would be replaced...
Defeat in war would be a crippling blow to our economy and would probably prevent AGI development IMO. People will be more worried about debt, oil supplies, hyperinflation and defaults, blaming eachother for the disaster, fighting radicalism, sponsoring radicalism...
I didn't really address these in my prior post, so:
Yes, they have a substantial arsenal, but it's still a lot less than the deployed nukes of the USA once you count all the legs of the triad (the USA has started basing nuclear bombers out of Darwin - they've carefully said that they won't be carrying nukes on peacetime patrol, but that's as good as an admission that the nukes will be there - so even the non-carrier bombers are meaningfully in play, and of course in a Taiwan war scenario a large fraction of the SSBNs would be in attack position so as to destroy as much as possible on the ground). I think the most likely scenario if/when things go nuclear is that the PRC is forced to surrender (or suffers state failure due to nuclear bombardment), although things could indeed be different if Putin throws his hat into the ring.
I agree with you about the consequences of letting Taipei fall, which is why I'm not saying "wash our hands of Taiwan" despite my assessment of the situation.
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I think a conventional defeat is unlikely, not so much because of the word "defeat" as the word "conventional". The PLARF would have to be brought up to hair-trigger alert in any Taiwan war scenario because there would be US nuclear-capable bombers and plausibly SSBNs operating within striking range of the Chinese heartland and even the missile siloes. That creates the risk of a false alarm leading to nuclear launch. On the US side things are almost as bad; they'd be working from on-the-ground assets rather than satellites to detect a nuclear launch due to the PLARF shooting down US spy satellites (they've been planning massive ASAT use in event of war for a long, long time, and they care a lot less about the inevitable consequence of Kessler syndrome), and while the US deterrent is secure the possibility of cutting things down from "100 cities nuked" to "10 cities nuked" via counter-force strike is quite tempting, so again there's the possibility of a false alarm leading to nuclear attack.
Overall I'd say maybe 1-2% per day of conventional war that things go nuclear (I checked this by someone closer to the business and he said it was the right order of magnitude). But that adds up fast - certainly if it turns into a months-long business that's going to happen sooner or later.
There's definitely hope that Xi realises how terrible an idea this is and calls it off. Barring that, and barring the USA just giving up, I think we're looking at nine-figure or ten-figure casualties.
Chinese nuclear doctrine is rather carefree, they have this general assumption that everyone knows that it's retarded to risk nuclear war so nobody will strike first. Consider how weak China's nuclear arsenal was back in the Cold War - zero second-strike capability whatsoever and a tiny number of warheads. Yet they were still very provocative, fighting a border war with the Soviet Union over a random river island!
Now that had a lot to do with Mao's erratic decision-making. But they genuinely thought and probably still think (in terms of strategic culture) 'as long as we announce no-first use nobody will attack us with nukes because if they do, they're creating a risk out of nothing, so all we need is fairly credible second-strike, which we have today'. Furthermore, why would they expect the US to trade LA for Taipei, given that the US doesn't even acknowledge Taiwan as an independent country? Historically, the US is way more squeamish about casualties than China. Regardless of what would actually happen (especially given concerns about Chinese dual-use nuclear-conventional C4I infrastructure being targeted by US long-range strike), I think Chinese leadership is quite confident that they'll avoid nuclear use.
Thanks for the info. Updated upward slightly on the chance that they'll actually go for it. Unfortunate.
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The one thing to be said for the American military is that it is experienced. The US was in Afghanistan for a long time; There are bases that saw generations of soldiers. And now with the Ukraine, the systems continue to be battle tested. Manufacturing has been humming along for a long time...
And to quote a scholar, 'Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth'.
When was the last time China actually used it's military in a meaningful way?
They lost those wars. The last time the US won a war was in 1991 and things have changed a lot since then. Especially in terms of naval warfare, nobody has fought battles at sea since the Falklands, nobody has any clue what's going on. At any rate, the Chinese don't let their light aircraft carriers burn down in port, nor have their warships crashed into civilian freighters by accident. This is probably a good sign for China, a bad sign for the US.
The Ukrainians and Russians have real experience at conventional warfare, the US and NATO not so much. There are threads from Ukrainian infantry where they report going to NATO training centres after time on the front and they're like 'OK, your small-unit tactics are good but where are the drones? Where are they??? Why are you telling us to clump up so much, they have artillery! Your mine-clearing advice was literally nothing?'
https://twitter.com/Teoyaomiquu/status/1699193558685618235
The West has gotten slack, fighting and losing to people who could barely fight back. I don't think we can call ourselves prepared for serious warfare, or at least more prepared than China.
The US military-industrial complex is struggling to feed the needs of this medium-high intensity war. Reserves of Javelins, Stingers, artillery shells, long-range missiles have been depleted and will take many years to rebuild. If there's one clear advantage that China has, it's manufacturing throughput.
Sino-Vietnamese war, which demonstrated immensely better political-military coordination. They got in quickly, achieved their limited, achievable goals and left. No quagmire, no mucking about, no trauma. Before that was Korea, where they bailed out North Korea and stalemated the US plus half of the UN.
By what metric? How could they win? And is that sort of win condition even possible, in today's climate?
The US is NATO and the US has been at war (multiple wars) for pretty much the last 20+ years.
Do you really think WWII style warfare matters? It's like saying Briton is still a powerhouse because they have the most longbows.
I think you're misusing 'we' there, lol.
Lol, that is literally backyard. I said meaningful way... And besides, how much of that media is honest?
If you just took the propaganda from the Vietnam war at face value, the US did amazingly well!
You realize the stalemate was because no one wanted WWIII, right? And the USSR was a meaningful (and overestimated) power.
US political goals were not met, thus it's a loss. Whatever they wanted, I really don't think an Iranian-dominated Iraq and Taliban-controlled Afghanistan was on the wishlist. The US being so disorganized and incompetent that they didn't even know what they wanted in Afghanistan doesn't mean it's impossible for them to lose, we know clearly there were outcomes they didn't want (what actually happened).
You can't just say 'we won all the battles and got a great K/D but some weird political stuff happened and we left the other guy controlling the territory' - wars are about politics.
Against foes with little artillery, no airpower, no long-range strike, no armour, no air defence, no space assets, minimal naval power, little EW and C4I, a tiny budget... Not conventional wars, not against strong opponents and not even victories. North Vietnam had tanks, artillery, air defence and could fight a conventional campaign.
The military experience you get from these wars is not too helpful in real wars. In fact it teaches bad lessons. Infantry get too cocky and reliant on fire support, they get sloppy with comms discipline, they don't expect to deal with artillery... See the many US servicemen who went to Ukraine and went 'Jesus the Russians fire so many shells, this is totally different to massacring light infantry in flip-flops'.
It matters in Ukraine. Dig the trench. Shell the town. Fling long-range missiles at factories, electricity generation.
I am a citizen of a Western country, therefore I can say 'we'.
Well then where is Saigon? China's goals were to teach the Vietnamese a lesson for messing with Cambodia and allying with the Soviets, which they did. They'd communicated to the US and USSR that it was a limited war beforehand.
The stalemate was because the PLA, with horrendously bad logistics and little firepower, pushed the US/UN forces out of North Korea and into South Korea before overextending. What they did in the cold, in the mountains was an incredible feat, achieving surprise against an enemy that ruled the skies and was much better equipped. Neither the US nor China particularly wanted to escalate the war - hence the US was unwilling to bomb into Manchuria and China didn't go in on Taiwan. But China achieved their goal - get the US out of North Korea, off their border. The US also achieved their goal of keeping South Korea alive so the US, SK and China can be considered winners, while North Korea was the biggest loser.
If your metric is fighting ability and military experience, then you sure can. Isn't that what you were originally questioning?
Firstly, the actual combat experience is limited and often unhelpful in many aspects for high-intensity warfare as I point up above.
Secondly, they show a lack of political-military coordination which is the single most important factor in warfare. The politicians and the soldiers need to be aligned, on the same side, working for victory above all else. The generals should not be scheming to deceive the politicians about conditions on the front, the politicians shouldn't be coming up with random exit dates or constraining use of force impractically, or meddling excessively in strategy for political purposes. Procurement and budgets should be focused on cost-efficiency, not politically motivated. It should be a close partnership working together, motivating soldiers to fight out a credible well-planned campaign for their country.
I'm not exaggerating when I say this is the most important factor, just look at how the US military struggles with morale and recruiting! Soldiers are demoralized by political dysfunction, by incoherent, losing wars in the Middle East. The USS Fitzgerald crashed because they were overworked and undermanned, asked to do too many (political) presence missions in Asia. Political emphasis on progressivism also has some bad effects, there was a whole report on how racial favoritism is undermining meritocracy, how some sailors felt like there was more emphasis on box-ticking and DIE than weapons handling.
Winning all the battles against China and having a great K/D but still losing the war would still be a loss.
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What flavor of kool-aid is that?
This is not an argument or rebuttal, it's just a sneer. Don't post like this.
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I would dispute this. AGI, as it already exists in prototypical form in GPT-4 and friends, is a net value add to the economy. The knowhow won't go away, not now, and while I expect the majority of datacenters to get fried in WW3, I'd still expect them to be rebuilt within say, a decade or two, and then governments to focus on AGI as a strategic trump card to forestall a second nuking. AGI x-risk doesn't sound quite as bad when 10-20% of your population perished in nuclear fire and the culprits are around for round 2.
Even a damaged, teetering economy benefits from chatbots, and the mid-tier ones fit on a single consumer gpu. The cat isn't going back in the bag short of complete civilizational collapse on the scale of people struggling to power their electronics at all.
Say US share market takes a 50% valuation cut because the USD is now a second-rate currency... who is going to be doing venture capital for AI startups? Which big company is going to say 'lets be really ambitious in capital expenditure and R&D when our revenue has just collapsed and everyone's panicking?' It would be like a crypto winter but for the real economy. And if it goes nuclear, then I think the US and China are out of the game entirely. There would be massive brain drain away from an irradiated, EMPed, disintegrated state.
Even if you can run a chatbot on your PC, you certainly can't train it there. And if China controls Taiwan and South Korea's shipping lanes, they can siphon off the chips we need, along with much of the apparently-indispensable Taiwanese engineering talent needed to make chip fabs. China as No.1 GP could put a lot of pressure on ASML and the like to give them highest priority.
On the other hand I guess that DARPA and the like would go full speed ahead on superweapon research (why wouldn't they already be at full speed ahead though?) It does depend a lot on timelines. I reckon massively transformative AGI can be 15 years away, maximum. But it could be longer, giving more time to catch up after a loss.
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