The only problem is that this would further accelerate the pressure to produce software advances. Certain software improvements are not being done maximally fast at the moment, because the industry leaders are overrelying on the “bitter lesson” and on the huge fleets of GPU in a somewhat brute force fashion.
(Michael Pollan in his “The Botany of Desire” explains how drug prohibition has resulted in much faster advances towards very strong modern cannabis by creating pressure to produce a stronger punch per unit of weight and volume.
People look at nuclear non-proliferation as a semi-successful example of prohibition, but the situation might be closer to our drug war. It’s easy to target the AI leaders with their large fleets of GPUs and large teams, just like it’s feasible to regulate the big pharma. It might be way more difficult to figure out who are all the small groups all over the world pursuing non-saturating recursive self-improvement of scaffoldings and such on top of already released open weight LLMs. A failed prohibition is likely to lower the odds of reasonable outcome by making the identity of the winner and the nature of the winning approach very unpredictable.)
The only problem is that this would further accelerate the pressure to produce software advances. Certain software improvements are not being done maximally fast at the moment, because the industry leaders are overrelying on the “bitter lesson” and on the huge fleets of GPU in a somewhat brute force fashion.
(Michael Pollan in his “The Botany of Desire” explains how drug prohibition has resulted in much faster advances towards very strong modern cannabis by creating pressure to produce a stronger punch per unit of weight and volume.
People look at nuclear non-proliferation as a semi-successful example of prohibition, but the situation might be closer to our drug war. It’s easy to target the AI leaders with their large fleets of GPUs and large teams, just like it’s feasible to regulate the big pharma. It might be way more difficult to figure out who are all the small groups all over the world pursuing non-saturating recursive self-improvement of scaffoldings and such on top of already released open weight LLMs. A failed prohibition is likely to lower the odds of reasonable outcome by making the identity of the winner and the nature of the winning approach very unpredictable.)