I do think a lab being willing to spend down depends on there being concensus among lab leadership that there is such a lead with a high degree of confidence. For example, given that Plan C requires that one of the current frontier labs pulls ahead, this would mean that it also would need to pull ahead by enough of a margin where their leadership agrees that they definitely are ahead.
Concretely, it seems to me like the “1-3 month lead” worlds are likely to collapse into Plan D. It’s also plausible to me that the “amount of margin the leading lab would need before they’d be willing to spend any on safety” is very high, and that they wouldn’t “spend down to zero”, so in practice you would need one lab, soon, to start pulling very far ahead.
Note this is somewhat minor, I found the overall post and similar posts very useful!
I do think a lab being willing to spend down depends on there being concensus among lab leadership that there is such a lead with a high degree of confidence. For example, given that Plan C requires that one of the current frontier labs pulls ahead, this would mean that it also would need to pull ahead by enough of a margin where their leadership agrees that they definitely are ahead.
Concretely, it seems to me like the “1-3 month lead” worlds are likely to collapse into Plan D. It’s also plausible to me that the “amount of margin the leading lab would need before they’d be willing to spend any on safety” is very high, and that they wouldn’t “spend down to zero”, so in practice you would need one lab, soon, to start pulling very far ahead.
Note this is somewhat minor, I found the overall post and similar posts very useful!