I don’t yet have a situation-global opinion here, but “once anyone invested the compute, the treasure would be theirs” doesn’t seem like a valid transition. The primary constraint in connecting abstract research to economic applications is generalist-capable domain-experts being motivated to bridge the gap from theory to something a VC or customer can understand.
While you can’t stay still forever relying on the absence of that force, a small non-prestigious community uniquely positioned to work in a field deciding not to seek investments and capability-research would certainly have further delayed the viability of the treasure, in turn supporting non-capabilities-dependent alignment-contribution tactics like intelligence augmentation, foundational research, philosophical research, or prestige-building from non-X-risk charitable efforts to acquire credibility for X-risk-mitigation.
There are valid replacement-reasons that could slot in the same place in your presented reasoning, including-but-not-limited-to longer timeline-estimates making personal-judgement-of-influencers more important than timeline-reductions, reason to believe some specific other party was already working on making transformer-based autonomously-operating AI economically viable at the time, expectation that capabilities could meaningfully help with other X-risks before they became a concern themselves, etc. I’m not sure which specifically of those you would agree with, though.
I don’t yet have a situation-global opinion here, but “once anyone invested the compute, the treasure would be theirs” doesn’t seem like a valid transition. The primary constraint in connecting abstract research to economic applications is generalist-capable domain-experts being motivated to bridge the gap from theory to something a VC or customer can understand.
While you can’t stay still forever relying on the absence of that force, a small non-prestigious community uniquely positioned to work in a field deciding not to seek investments and capability-research would certainly have further delayed the viability of the treasure, in turn supporting non-capabilities-dependent alignment-contribution tactics like intelligence augmentation, foundational research, philosophical research, or prestige-building from non-X-risk charitable efforts to acquire credibility for X-risk-mitigation.
There are valid replacement-reasons that could slot in the same place in your presented reasoning, including-but-not-limited-to longer timeline-estimates making personal-judgement-of-influencers more important than timeline-reductions, reason to believe some specific other party was already working on making transformer-based autonomously-operating AI economically viable at the time, expectation that capabilities could meaningfully help with other X-risks before they became a concern themselves, etc. I’m not sure which specifically of those you would agree with, though.