“These technologies are deployed sufficiently narrowly that they do not meaningfully accelerate GWP growth.” I think this is fairly hard for me to imagine (since their lead would need to be very large to outcompete another country that did deploy the technology to broadly accelerate growth), perhaps 5%?
I think there is a reasonable way it could happen even without an enormous lead. You just need either,
Its very hard to capture a significant fraction of the gains from the tech.
Tech progress scales very poorly in money.
For example, suppose it is obvious to everyone that AI in a few years time will be really powerful. Several teams with lots of funding are set up. If progress is researcher bound, and researchers are ideologically committed to the goals of the project, then top research talent might be extremely difficult to buy. (They are already well paid, for the next year they will be working almost all day. After that, the world is mostly shaped by which project won.)
Compute could be hard to buy if there were hard bottlenecks somewhere in the chip supply chain, most of the worlds new chips were already being used by the AI projects, and an attitude of “our chips and were not selling” was prevalent.
Another possibility, suppose deploying a tech means letting the competition know how it works. Then if one side deploys, they are pushing the other side ahead. So the question is, does deploying one unit of research give you the resources to do more than one unit?
I think there is a reasonable way it could happen even without an enormous lead. You just need either,
Its very hard to capture a significant fraction of the gains from the tech.
Tech progress scales very poorly in money.
For example, suppose it is obvious to everyone that AI in a few years time will be really powerful. Several teams with lots of funding are set up. If progress is researcher bound, and researchers are ideologically committed to the goals of the project, then top research talent might be extremely difficult to buy. (They are already well paid, for the next year they will be working almost all day. After that, the world is mostly shaped by which project won.)
Compute could be hard to buy if there were hard bottlenecks somewhere in the chip supply chain, most of the worlds new chips were already being used by the AI projects, and an attitude of “our chips and were not selling” was prevalent.
Another possibility, suppose deploying a tech means letting the competition know how it works. Then if one side deploys, they are pushing the other side ahead. So the question is, does deploying one unit of research give you the resources to do more than one unit?