| > Schrödinger's China at once is an evil entity looking to use AI for their own nefarious purposes yet also willing to cooperate with their main competitor to prevent other actors (who??) from achieving similar goals (all while under a chip embargo too!!) To be fair, I found that part consistent. There is limited cooperation between enemy states all the time, e.g. see the grain deal between Ukraine and Russia before it collapsed or the "red phones" between the US and the Soviet Union during the cold war. In the case with China, the "cooperation" is much more extensive still, due to all the economic ties that both countries are currently unable to sever - which I think is also a reason that China is still seen as a "competitor" and not a full-blown "enemy state" in the US. It's restricted to areas where there is a genuine common interest of course. In this situation, I guess the "other actors" would be terror groups, criminals or just reckless corporations - that aren't aligned with either state. Obviously, such a cooperation wouldn't keep China or the US from developing models with those capabilities for their own armies. -- There are lots of other takes with questionable logic in the essay though, such as that China is unable to train frontier models by themselves due to lack of hardware - unless they obtain the training data directly from American frontier models via distillation. Or the assumption that open weights models will be completely opaque and immutable after their release, so a model that passed all the "safety" tests can never be turned back into an "unsafe" model. This seems pretty ridiculous when people are already finetuning open-weight models every day to add new abilities or remove restrictions. And of course that China must not have those abilities because it's an Authoritarian Regime, but Trump USA is totally fine... |
E.g. they might say something like "We absolutely agree that international regulation of AI is needed and we're willing to co-sponser an initiative with the US. One of the most pressing matters we see is the spread of despicable misinformation through unregulated models regarding certain events in China's history, the treatment of certain minorities or the status of certain provinces..."