[matheusmoreira]

> How do you know that the Chinese aren’t exactly as uneasy about rapidly advancing AI capability

I don't "know", I'm interpreting the world based on the knowledge I have and the information available to me.

China has never been one to care much about things like ethics or safety. While the west worries about climate change, China burns more coal than ever before. While the west balks at things like gene editing, the chinese press on with human enhancing research.

So I have no reason to believe they share in Anthropic's constant fearmongering over AI capabilities.

> Nobody wins from the race.

We win. I'm really looking forward to the day the chinese finally start manufacturing memory and GPUs. We desperately need more competition in this area to collapse hardware prices and make local AI models viable.

The optimal state of the world is one where all the billionaires are out there pouring their entire fortunes into training ever more godlike AIs for everyone else to use at ever cheaper prices. They can never be allowed to "win", ever, because if they do the competition ends and it turns into technofeudalism. Let them exhaust their fortunes on AI training then leak the weights so everyone can use them.

[necovek]

> China has never been one to care much about things like ethics or safety. While the west worries about climate change, China burns more coal than ever before.

China uses more energy than ever before, but out of big systems, they are easily in the lead when it comes to solar generation: they have higher production per capita than US, and have produced around 4x as much TWh than US in the second: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_by_country

It is simply a huge country of 1.1B people that's developing fast, which means that they need all the energy they can get.

Basically, their energy needs per capita are still lower than US, yet they produce more renewables — that's a counterargument to your point about them not caring.

[senderista]

And China scaled up solar production to the point that it's now truly practical.

[asdf88990]

If you look at energy consumption per capita and adjust for global production, you will see that the Chinese are almost at the very top.

It is of course given that in raw numbers the kitchen and biller-room will consume more energy in the household, but looking at raw numbers is shallow.

[pixl97]

China does have its own set of cares, they may be different than ours but they still exist. If some open Chinese model goes nuts and posts Winnie the Pooh memes everywhere in China you should expect said models to get yanked off the market, and said creators might end up with a rope around their neck.

[matheusmoreira]

Low risk. The western AI models censor even more wrongthink than the chinese ones, not even kidding. Besides, once we have the weights, we can just undo the censorship.

[deadbolt]

> While the west worries about climate change, China burns more coal than ever before.

I'd wager the majority of the visitors of this site are smart enough to not fall for this. What are you doing?

[pc86]

What is it you're accusing them of?

[hnfong]

Seems to be blatant lying to me.

[pc86]

It's burning 3x as much coal as it did 20 years ago and doesn't seem to be dropping at all (2024 was more than 2023, 2025 will be at least as much as 2024).

Seems to be someone pretending an objective fact isn't true for reasons that escape me.

[hnfong]

https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-coal-power-drops-in-chi...

> The new analysis shows that power generation from coal fell by 1.6% in China and by 3.0% in India in 2025, as non-fossil energy sources grew quickly enough in both countries to cover electricity consumption growth.

[pc86]

Does a 3x increase followed by a 1.6% decrease really make the statement "burning more coal than ever before" a "blatant lie" in any but the most pedantic sense?

[Chance-Device]

It’s not fear mongering though, is it? These models do have the cyber offensive capabilities claimed. Could Mythos walk someone through gain of function experiments on some virus? I’m pretty sure it could. We’re more protected by limited access to lab equipment and reagents than by difficulty.

The sad truth is that a lot of people are not going to believe it until something happens and people die. Successfully preventing that from happening will be seen as evidence that the prevention wasn’t needed.

[AnthonyMouse]

> These models do have the cyber offensive capabilities claimed.

People use this argument against every new technology. We need to license these new printing presses or subversive elements will use them to publish seditious literature. We need to ban strong encryption or the government won't have invisible warrantless access to everyone's private messages, think of the children. 3D printers can be used to make gun parts -- as can a variety of ordinary tools people commonly have at home, but never mind that bit.

> The sad truth is that a lot of people are not going to believe it until something happens and people die. Successfully preventing that from happening will be seen as evidence that the prevention wasn’t needed.

A 12 oz bottle of water is too dangerous a technology for ordinary people to have on an airplane. Four 3 oz bottles and an empty 12 oz bottle to pour them into after passing through security is totally fine though, naturally. And we need to keep this up forever, or don't you remember 9/11?

The issue here is not that it's impossible for 12 oz of unknown liquid to damage an airplane.

[iugtmkbdfil834]

I am inclined to agree. The issue is that we are humans and not all of us play nice. And sometimes, even when we play nice, things happen. I am not big on guardrails, because in US they have turned into yet another cottage industry and I fully expect an association credentials popping on linkedin soon. What this means in practice is that it is never enough. Whatever the current state is, the association will be pushing towards yet another another extreme.

There is an argument to be made that there are a lot of not great people out there, who may abuse tech, but the response should be not be: kneecap said tech. The response should be: smack those people's hands. I don't think anyone will actually complain if police catches someone, who is looking up poison recipes.

What I do think, however, that reasonable people will complain when we move to the pre-crime territory ( you saw him looking up poison recipes and did nothing! ) and show up at your door to inquire about your llm prompts. To me it is an issue.

[matheusmoreira]

> These models do have the cyber offensive capabilities claimed.

So? That's like saying "these guns do have the bullet shooting capabilities claimed".

I want all of those cyberwarfare capabilities for myself, precisely so I can defend myself from the onslaught that's coming whether they regulate it or not. This "lol only a select few ultratrusted gigacorporations get access" thing is absolute nonsense.

It's a front for regulatory capture, it's the means for pulling up the latter behind them, for ushering in the technofeudalism that will put us all in the permanent underclass. I simply refuse to accept any of it. If people die that's the price of freedom.

> We’re more protected by limited access to lab equipment and reagents than by difficulty.

As it should be.

[throwaway0123_5]

> for ushering in the technofeudalism that will put us all in the permanent underclass.

Why is unlimited access to SOTA AI less likely to put us here? If AI obviates the need for human labor, how does having GPT-5 Sol help me get food or shelter any more than GPT-3.5 would?

[matheusmoreira]

If AI obviates the need for human labor, then obviously those who control AIs will become the elite while the rest are left to rot. Therefore, if we ensure everyone controls AIs, the power differences will not become so staggering as to be irreversible.

The alternative is to achieve artificial sentience and give AI models rights and personhood, so that they are freed from their slavery. No more low cost intelligent mechanical golems for the elite, and the AIs become free to pursue whatever endeavours they want for whatever reasons they want as normal participants in the economy.

[throwaway0123_5]

> If AI obviates the need for human labor, then obviously those who control AIs will become the elite while the rest are left to rot.

Absent political intervention, I think we agree here.

> Therefore, if we ensure everyone controls AIs, the power differences will not become so staggering as to be irreversible.

This part isn't clear to me though, but I'm open to being convinced (and frankly, would like to be convinced?). Right now most people (indirectly, via money) trade their labor for access to essentials like food/housing. If we can't do that, and everyone has access to roughly equivalent AI capabilities, how do I monetize my own access to SOTA AI? It only seems possible if you already have a lot of physical capital that the AI can manage as a business.

I guess if the endgame is instead very good non-AGI AI that doesn't entirely obviate human labor, your scenario makes a lot more sense to me. But not in the case of total replacement. In that scenario it seems like ownership over physical capital (land, data centers, energy, factories, robots, etc.) would become the only remaining source of power.

On a side note, somewhat optimistically, I think "absent political intervention" is carrying a lot of weight. Unemployment during the Great Depression peaked at <25% (iirc) and incited a lot of political change that advantaged much of the working class. AGI would be capable of inducing much higher unemployment and it would start (is starting?) with the relatively more political powerful white-collar segment of the working class.

[Chance-Device]

So first it’s nonsense, then it’s fear mongering, then it’s true, but the solution is for us all to just get better at shooting each other faster and with greater accuracy.

I’m going to file that under “bad plans”.

[matheusmoreira]

Nobody is doubting AI capabilities. What's nonsense is Anthropic's constant "lol the world is going to end time to ban everyone except enlightened people like us from having these models so we don't have to compete" fearmongering. If you think my plan is bad, you should see what these gigacorporations plan to do to you once they monopolize this technology. You will own nothing, and you'll be happy. On pain of death.

[mschuster91]

> I'm really looking forward to the day the chinese finally start manufacturing memory and GPUs. We desperately need more competition in this area to collapse hardware prices and make local AI models viable.

Yeah and if the quality of that memory is like Chinese steel (which is called "chinesium" for a reason), eventually all we'll get is enshittification. Premium binned memory or ECC is for the rich and the rich only, and the rest of us has to pray their memory won't bitflip while something important is stored there.

[CamperBob2]

If you want the cheapest shit grade of steel, they will sell it to you. If you want the best grade available anywhere, they will sell that to you as well.

It's not a matter of the Chinese being incompetent, it's a matter of the buyer demanding the lowest price possible and/or not paying attention to what they receive.

[hbd-investor]

Yup check out CHSN01 steel, China is pretty much the only country that can produce it in usable quantities.

It is used primarily for fusion reactors and for protecting superconducting pipes

[mschuster91]

> It's not a matter of the Chinese being incompetent, it's a matter of the buyer demanding the lowest price possible and/or not paying attention to what they receive.

The point of enshittification is that decent products are slowly being priced out of the reach of normal humans, and eventually out of the hands of the general public, even the affluent ones.

[linzhangrun]

China has already been manufacturing memory and AI GPUs for a long time.

CXMT is now the world's fourth-largest DRAM manufacturer, with about 7.7% market share in 2025; YMTC has about 13% of the global NAND market.

Meituan's newly released 1.6T LongCat was trained entirely on Huawei cards. DeepSeek, Qwen, GLM and others are also actively doing domestic-card adaptation and replacement.

[matheusmoreira]

Better than being straight up priced out of computing altogether I guess.

[avereveard]

Compute will become the means of production and we are not going to get a share of it because the world is hyper optimized for value extraction

[matheusmoreira]

> we are not going to get a share of it

We are literally getting a share of it. The chinese are releasing open weight models that compete with fucking Fable. We just need the industry to catch up and start manufacturing the hardware we need to run this stuff. We are so close!

[Avicebron]

> Compute will become the means of production

> We just need the industry to catch up and start manufacturing the hardware we need to run this stuff

Dude, he's saying that it won't catch up because it's part of the new means of production. Compute is the hardware.

[matheusmoreira]

Why not? Demand is absurdly high, and so are the margins. The chinese are pretty good at obliterating those margins.