[nonameiguess]

It's quite a bit different. Access to weapons-grade plutonium is inherently scarce. The basic techniques for producing a transformer architecture to emulate human-level text and image generation is out in the open. The only scarce resource right now preventing anyone from reproducing the research themselves from scratch is the data and compute required to do it. But data and compute aren't plutonium. They aren't inherently scarce. Unless we shut down all advances in electronics and communications, period, shutting down AI research only stops it until data and compute is sufficiently abundant that anyone can do what currently only OpenAI and a few pre-existing giants can do.

What does that buy us? An extra decade?

I don't know where this leaves us. If you're in the MIRI camp believing AI has to lead to runaway intelligence explosion to unfathomable godlike abilities, I don't see a lot of hope. If you believe that is inevitable, then as far as I'm concerned, it's truly inevitable. First, because I think formally provable alignment of an arbitrary software system with "human values," however nebulously you might define that, is fundamentally impossible, but even if it were possible, it's also fundamentally impossible to guarantee in perpetuity that all implementations of a system will forever adhere to your formal proof methods. For 50 years, we haven't even been able to get developers to consistently use strnlen. As far as I can tell, if sufficiently advanced AI can take over its light cone and extinguish all value from the universe, or whatever they're up to now on the worry scale, then it will do so.

[nonameiguess]

I guess I should add, because so few people do, this is what I believe, but it's entirely possible I'm wrong, so by all means, MIRI, keep trying. If you'd asked anyone in the world except three men before 1975 if public key cryptography was possible, they'd have said no, but here we are. Wow me with your math.