Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by fragmede 19 days ago
The people saying this is happening are competing with each other for resources, so there's no way for one of them to hold back without losing out to the others. We see this with people dropping Claude subscriptions in favor of ChatGPT because codex 5.5 > Claude Opus 4.6/7/8. Anthropic is losing money by not releasing Mythos.
1 comments
aidenn0 19 days ago
You are proposing that going from N companies chasing AGI to N-1 companies chasing AGI will have zero effect on when AGI happens?
link
fragmede 19 days ago
Aidenn0 said they're doing their best to accelerate it, and I'm saying "they're" isn't a single monolithic entity and that they're in competition with each other so they're incentivized to go as fast as possible, so it would be hard to hold them back.
link
aidenn0 18 days ago
This is a good point, but my point is that they chose to get into this business.

1. Some people have no ethical problems making bombs.

2. Some people have an ethical problem with making bombs so do something else.

3. Some people have an ethical problem with making bombs, but say "well someone else will make it if I don't" so they make bombs.

I think it is reasonable to argue against #3 as a reasonable position.

link
palmotea 19 days ago
> Aidenn0 said they're doing their best to accelerate it, and I'm saying "they're" isn't a single monolithic entity and that they're in competition with each other so they're incentivized to go as fast as possible, so it would be hard to hold them back.

Maybe it would run afoul of antitrust regulations, but it's totally realistic for all those competitors to get together and say "hey, we could really fuck up society in our race to get rich with this tech, lets all slow down." And if these companies are run my mature people who don't subordinate every consideration to greed, they'd to it.

link
My_Name 19 days ago
I would propose that it is very likely to have zero effect. Your argument supposes they are all working together, like many connected computers calculating primes.

It only takes one of them to do it and they are not sharing information. If the 1 you remove from N is the one that will discover it, then it will dramatically affect when AGI happens. If it is not, then it will have zero effect.

The latter is far more likely if N>2

link