[m_ke]

Yeah some real main character energy from Dario as usual.

I'll never get why he thinks China would just sit there and let the US dominate them in AI when all it would take is a few of their boats blockading Taiwan to put a stop to it all.

[rubslopes]

This Onion meme is perfect; you could easily replace Sam with Dario: https://theonion.com/sam-altman-if-i-dont-end-the-world-some...

[cassianoleal]

You don’t need to replace them. Dario is the “someone” in question.

[brokenmachine]

What exactly happens to a "losing" country when it has been AI "dominated"?

[crossroadsguy]

You already have examples. Venezuela, Iran, Ukraine, Libya… maybe Japan? The list is sort of long. Juxtapose or something.

[brokenmachine]

And here I was thinking that all of those had nothing to do with AI.

[crossroadsguy]

Oh. I thought a whole lot of the point and discussion of this post was AI being potentially weaponised and becoming means of economic and military control and coercion. Or did I really miss something?

[brokenmachine]

Which of those country examples have AI being used as a means of economic and military control and coercion?

Ukraine and Iran, no. I'm not familiar with the others.

[mctaylor]

Yes and no. Yes because it's more about oil than AI, no because AI is the oil industry and their supporting vested financial interests' (not so secret) plan to keep demand for fossil fuel high if/when the climate change deniers lose.

"We would love to use green energy, but all the batteries and solar panels come from China and China is evil, and we need all the energy we can get to run the data centres we need to spy on our citizens so they don't revolt once the environment is literally on fire, we can't feed them, provide enough energy to cool them, and refuse to build enough housing to house them."

[alightsoul]

Why is the US so scared of this fate? To the rest of the world, they're tecnofeudalist monopolists.

[PangXJ]

or you can image, what exactly happens to a "losing" country when it has been a small clique "dominated"?

[sterlind]

wouldn't stop AI companies from continuing to develop using their current infrastructure.

the West could retaliate by halting shipments of photoresist and other materials to China.

meanwhile, Intel second-sources Nvidia and starts pumping out GPUs.

the economic fallout would be devastating as trade wars and export bans on both sides make Trump's "Liberation Day" tariffs look like NAFTA.

[chrismsimpson]

The rest of the world would likely side with China. The export ban on Fable wasn’t even extended to five eyes countries.

US is going to find itself isolated and irrelevant. And not a moment too soon.

[matheusmoreira]

I do wonder what the world will look like under a chinese hegemony though...

[marcus_holmes]

China is very inward-looking, though. It's not really interested in world domination in the same sense that Europe was or even the USA was/is.

[nativeit]

China has been aggressively developing infrastructure and financial services all over Africa and the rest of Asia.

https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-24-106866

[marcus_holmes]

Yeah I saw this in Cambodia when I lived there. Sihanoukville had become a Chinese enclave almost completely.

Different to the way that French colonialism worked, though. Less direct government, more influence of existing power structures and respect for the local government.

There is definitely an argument that this is plain business investment - China has a lot of foreign currency to invest because of its trade surplus, and there isn't the opportunity within China to invest it all, so it is engaging with trade partners to invest in their economies so that they can increase future trade with China.

You can also make the argument that this is not benign and China is trying to create control over foreign governments with this investment.

I'm kinda "both can be true, but either are better than how we did it"

[fakedang]

They've mostly been concerned with resource extraction rather than colonial exploitation like the West. And in fact, they've ditched most of their infra and tech projects in Africa, because of inherent instability in dealing with tinpot dictatorships.

On the other hand, every one in Asia is wary of too much Chinese presence and influence.

[fnord77]

resource extraction

stealth colonialism

[ninjin]

I keep hearing this and I fail to see any reason to believe that it will be the case. Any empire, in the history of our species, has always had an initial "inward-looking" period prior to becoming a full-fledged imperialist oppressor. Edo-period Japan into Imperial Japan, for example. Rather, what I think any budding empire needs a period of growth to become a large enough fish and also to delude its leadership and population into the convenient mindset that their flavour of imperialism is good and justified ("Hakkou ichiu", "The white man's burden", etc.).

To me, the PRC is at the very end of that process and I recommend anyone doubting this to go and read conversations and listen to the words of the populace that is turning increasingly nationalistic and you will hear the same old tales of revanchism and exceptionalism that we are used to hearing (during my recent visit, I watched the morning news every day for about a week and without fail a military inspection, new ship, new plane, etc. was presented each day). In addition, I think those outside of Asia are very much shielded from the early signs, but go and read about PRC influence and tensions in South Korea, Japan, RoC, Philippines, Vietnam, Laos, Myanmar, India, Pakistan, and Tajikistan and you will see something rather different than "inward-looking". To me, here the PRC is simply testing the waters for the extent of the influence of other powers and how far it can go. Likewise, we are seeing overseas naval bases being constructed which sure is an indication for a desire to project power outwards.

I want to believe that this time it will be different. I really do. Apologists around me say "It will only be Taiwan and the South China Sea, then then it will stop." and I would love to believe them. But can anyone truly internalise the narrative that international utopia will be spearheaded by a deeply authoritarian state that controls information like no other (and gladly exports that technology), disappears its own population at will, spins an increasingly strong nationalistic narrative, etc.? No, sorry, I think the "inward-looking" narrative is simply a convenient way for us to close our eyes and find comfort in ignorance, rather than in facts.

[marcus_holmes]

You may well be right, and it's really only that China has been more inward-looking recently, and given the chance it will spread its true colonial wings.

[brabel]

So let’s just guess what China will do once it becomes dominant and act like it already did whatever we conjured up they will do. That’s how you get preventive wars that destroy civilizations without any actual basis on reality.

[Khaine]

Except of course for claiming all of the South China seas. See the Nine-dash line

[elisbce]

"Not interested in world domination" LOL. That's what Putin said 10 years ago.

[gpvos]

It has been quite good at indebting countries to them, in Africa but also e.g. Montenegro.

[MaxPock]

Africans are more indebted to Western multilateral organizations and private Western bondholders than to the Chinese. The idea that Africans are being finessed by the Chinese is racist and stems from a "we know what's good for you" imperialistic lens.

[a34729t]

better dim sum, hopefully. the local chinese food is a crime against gastronomy.

[chrismsimpson]

You’re already seeing it. Strategic bilateralism.

[FooBarWidget]

It's called Tang and Ming dynasty. We already know.

[petre]

Keep an eye on Central Asia and Pakistan then? They are heavily infuenced by China.

[verdverm]

We are moving from unipolar hegemony to multipolar. There will be upwards of a dozen poles in time

[matheusmoreira]

Doubt. China is clearly on a level of its own compared to virtually every other country out there other than the USA.

[verdverm]

I find it unlikely to be a duoply of hegemony for long, some countries to watch are Germany, Japan, India, Nigeria, and Brazil. You could broaden the geography to continents were I expect major players to emerge on each.

We are only a few decades since the "end of history" and much has changed. What do things look like beyond 2050?

[greekrich92]

No worse than under US hegemony

[thesmtsolver2]

Much much worse: see Tibet or Hong Kong

[one33seven]

Vietnam, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan...

[tw1984]

care to explain why all governors of Hong Kong under the british rule were white males?

[owebmaster]

How is Hong Kong worse than say, Puerto Rico?

[TheArcane]

certainly better than this one. Look at Africa under western neocolonialism vs China's infrastructure loans

[thesmtsolver2]

As someone from India and someone who knows people from Tibet, Chinese hegemony will be much much worse.

There is no HN equivalent in China where users advocate that US hegemony will be better.

[alightsoul]

On the other hand, India is enemies with China and Tibet is a highly oppressed region. I wonder what the average Chinese in china thinks.

[lenerdenator]

And that's going just swimmingly [0]

[0] https://www.indiatvnews.com/news/world/chinese-manager-beats... (possibly NSFW, I can't see the video in my browser but be warned)

[vhantz]

There is no good imperialist power, there is no capitalism with a human face, there will never be. The UK murdered millions in India, Ireland and all around the world in their time. The US did the same. The only reason China isn't openly doing the same right now is because they are still the underdog and they still need cordiality to get through the door, just like the UK and the US did in their time. The solution is to rid the world of imperialism and capitalism as a whole. As long as there is a profit motive running through everything, international relations will be in the form of wars (military or economic). Only under socialism can the people of the world truly pool their resources together to build up instead of destroying each other.

[soperj]

China would just start buying oil again, and stop using it from their strategic reserve. Hello $200 barrels of oil.

[verdverm]

> the West could retaliate by halting shipments of

China quickly retaliated last time by stopping shipments of rare earths and magnets. The West has no answer for this, really up the river without a paddle for such critical supply chain elements.

[0cf8612b2e1e]

I was led to believe that the US does have internal sources of these, but they are largely undeveloped. For years the processing could not economically compete with China so shutdown.

Which is to say, given internal subsidies, the US could eventually produce some on its own.

Unless I misunderstood the situation.

[verdverm]

I believe we both share this understanding, the problems are

1. China controls ~90% today

2. The US will find it difficult to build out because of how dirty and environmentally damaging mining and processing are.

I did see some research last week about a better way to process rare earths, but it is still research and will need to be industrialized.

Regardless, it will take many years (decade+?) to become self sufficient and China is already willing to and increasingly restricting them

[verdverm]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49084690

https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/trump-may-need-allo...

[tw1984]

China controls way more things, from medical needles to pharmaceutical ingredient.

Lots of them can be made in the west or west friendly countries, but that takes time, money, infrastructure and good execution. Yes, identical to what is covered in China's belt and road initiatives. See the gap now?

[windexh8er]

Dario is more of a threat to the US, in terms of advancements in AI, than China. In Dario's mind anything that can't be controlled competitively is a threat to Anthropic, so he positions his FUD strawman so that Dario doesn't have to worry about the competition. And then he can artificially inflate token costs so his IPO can happen. Dario doesn't actually care about ethics, alignment or availability of LLMs - he just likes to use those words to sound like he does. Yet we've all seen how Anthropic actually acts vs what they say.

The scary part very few are talking about is that every compute device is Turing complete. So everything from the phone in your pocket to a DGX Spark is a threat to national security now since, technically, every device can run any model (how well is not a question of concern when you start to argue hardware should be gated just the same as Dario likes to gate models). I mean, along these lines of thinking Linux should not be available to the masses! What if someone runs some code that's not approved by the benevolent dictator for life, Dario? People will say: that can't happen, but the reality is it already is. If everyone has reasonable access to compute to run models that are mostly capable comparative to burning Anthropic tokens, why wouldn't they? It's risk reduction and price protection. Yet we can't buy those systems because of future production already being purchased by these organizations.

But back to the models themselves... We played this game with Metasploit back in the day: many who had no clue claimed exploit tools should be regulated and only available for use by those blessed, illegal elsewhere (I believe the closest this got was the Wassenaar delegation in the US, but only through collateral inclusion of "cyber weapons "). Except in that timeframe the authors of these tools weren't advocating for protection. Today the world is fine, systems improved because of security FOSS tooling. The same thing will happen with LLMs. Unless, that is, Dario gets his way. I'm not a fan of Altman but I think he's standing back watching this play out knowing what Dario is doing: either he succeeds and OAI benefits or Dario ends up the Chicken Little of AI and Anthropic fails to launch (their IPO).

The reality is Dario is only doing this because this is a real risk to his business. China's constraints in building competitively have given them an advantage: they are doing more with less. And if you think that their distilling from US models was in any way anti-competitive or illegal, then I guess maybe "deal with it", much akin to Anthropic, Google and OAI's response around taking the (copyright) content in the first place with no repercussions.

People who don't work in the AI bubble don't care at all about any of these people. They could all be gone overnight and the world would continue to innovate, probably in a much more productive manner, without them.

[ethbr1]

> And if you think that their distilling from US models was in any way anti-competitive or illegal, then I guess maybe "deal with it", much akin to Anthropic, Google and OAI's response around taking the (copyright) content in the first place with no repercussions.

Exactly. The cries in favor of distillation regulation from the US AI companies ring hollow and fearful.

OpenAI and Anthropic didn't realize that distillation was going to be so (a) effective and (b) un-technically-stoppable at scale.

Now they're seeing their IPOs at risk and clutching at governmental straws.

Dario's argument is transparently working backwards from {protect Anthropic's economic model} <- {need government regulation} <- {justify government regulation via AI fears} <- {we love open models, but so sorry they can't pass regulation}.

If the rise of the web in the 90s taught us anything, it should have been that companies that take economic reality as it exists thrive, while those that predicate their value on regulation fail.

If distillation at scale works and is technically feasible? That's reality. Deal with it.

[wbl]

11 carriers are not just for show.

[otabdeveloper4]

Could have fooled me, judging by the Iran and Yemen performance.

[fakedang]

Iran showed us that they apparently are.

[wbl]

Don't confuse political limitations and lack of a theory of victory with the inability to achieve a goal. A blockade needs ships those ships can be destroyed.