What backward logic is this? PRC doesn't give a fuck about how US regulates AI companies. Pushing more regulation would ensure that Chinese companies catch up sooner. If you think otherwise you need to think harder.
It's a good thing you weren't in charge of nuclear arsenals during the Cold War, sounds like your approach would have been unchecked proliferation.
Fortunately developing frontier models takes immense amounts of specific resources and knowledge. There are only a handful of companies capable of developing new cutting edge models. This is an area a few governments absolutely could coordinate on and regulate, if they were so inclined.
Obviously the current US administration is completely lacking both the will and competence to actually negotiate an agreement like that with China, and who knows if Xi would even be interested. But with different leadership we actually could be reducing our existential risks in this area much more than we are. Just like having a few thousands nukes across several countries isn't totally safe, but it's a heck of a lot safer than hundreds of thousands of nukes spread across a hundred countries.
> It's a good thing you weren't in charge of nuclear arsenals during the Cold War
You know how many nukes Soviet had right at its peak? Hint: much more than the US by the time. Non proliferation didn't stop Soviet from building more nukes at all. And it's not going to stop China from pouring more computing power into AI. History is a really good lesson.
The whole point of non-proliferation is to ensure that big boys like the US and Soviet can bully smaller guys like Venezuela and Ukraine. In this regard, non-proliferation is the most successful foreign policy ever. But it didn't win the cold war and a similar policy over AI will definitely not win the AI race (if it's a race worth winning is another issue.)
The original topic was Anthropic's guardrails, which were meant in part to stop China from using Anthropic's models to bootstrap their own. I take it the logic of the comment was that pulling attention to Anthropic's stance on regulation is switching to the topic. But for what it's worth, I also think that people are way to quick to assume that strong regulations would only help China and thereby hurt safety. There are many reasons why the opposite may be true:
- reducing demand for Chinese models reduces the incentive for Chinese companies to make them
- if US companies can't use Chinese models, they won't have an incentive to help their development
- China may enact similar regulations if the US leads, either out of concern for US safety or for commercial reasons
Also, I think some similar things can be said about AI safety measures in China aside from regulation. Currently, the US leads in model safeguards, but it isn't like China has zero interest in AI safety. Even if the US and China are rivals, there are many points of common interest (biorisk and "sci-fi" scenarios like an AI takeover, to name just two).
I don't subscribe to the belief that regulations in the US will lead to China advancing further.
But I also don't buy into the "China bad" narrative that gets frequently spread in online circles and in political circles. Its the cold war all over again, but this time its China instead of the Soviet Union.
Regardless of that, the regulations being proposed by Anthropic recently are not focused on the current issues which is my problem with all the hype marketing around hypothetical AGI/ASI. What is being proposed to be put in place will further cement the current frontier labs in their marketing leading position, and work to block new entrants, and open source competitors. That is the problem.
The other problem is none of them are talking about the real, difficult issues we are experiencing right now in the present. We don't need to talk about a sci-fi future scenario to recognize that LLMs have already caused and are causing harm in the real world. "We should probably regulate future frontier models" does nothing to help the current issues.
Wake me up when Anthropic says "The government should immediately stop us from hoovering up data and selling it back to the public. They should immediately stop us and others from enabling misinformation at scale that is already negatively effecting our democratic process. They should immediately stop us from building out new data centers until we have a large scale switch to renewables in the country, shore up the grids, or force us to generate our own power only with renewables" so on and so forth. Notice how any time the labs propose regulations, its only for a future hypothetical super intelligent model. Its never about their current operational liabilities.
Fortunately developing frontier models takes immense amounts of specific resources and knowledge. There are only a handful of companies capable of developing new cutting edge models. This is an area a few governments absolutely could coordinate on and regulate, if they were so inclined.
Obviously the current US administration is completely lacking both the will and competence to actually negotiate an agreement like that with China, and who knows if Xi would even be interested. But with different leadership we actually could be reducing our existential risks in this area much more than we are. Just like having a few thousands nukes across several countries isn't totally safe, but it's a heck of a lot safer than hundreds of thousands of nukes spread across a hundred countries.