It is far more likely that Beijing sees near-term AI as a potential threat to stability that needs to be addressed with regulation.
This suggests that Beijing is making regulations that are driven by short-term thinking and not careful thinking over longer timelines.
Generally, my perspective of Chinese decision-making is that government policy is written by people who are able to think over longer timelines.
To me “AGI has to be aligned with CEV” and the sentence of “AGI has to be aligned with socialist values” sound very similar to me. Anything that’s an existential threat to humanity is also an existential threat to the CCP.
Even if they all become law and are strictly enforced, they are simply regulations on AI data usage and training.
If the US would create similar rules and enforce them it would do a lot more than the six-month training pause. The rules prevent the training of large language models based on random internet data and allow only training it on high-quality data.
If you want to slow down dangerous AI development but not slow down AI alignment work, those policies sound a lot smarter than what the letter calling for the AI training pause calls for.
Do you really think that a scientist is going to walk up to his friend from the Politburo and say “Hey, I know AI is a central priority of ours, but there are a few fringe scientists in the US asking for treaties limiting AI, right as they are doing their hardest to cripple our own AI development. Yes, I believe they are acting in good faith, they’re even promising to not widen the current AI gap they have with us!”
No, but they might say “There’s a call for US labs to stop training larger AI models, can we take actions to support that proposal to slow down US AI development? Our analysts at the Cyberspace Administration of China believe that AI could be very dangerous if its development isn’t well regulated. Can we push for an international treaty that makes the recommendations of the Cyberspace Administration of China also binding on other countries?”
Chinese experts simply don’t think it’s a real issue yet. There is no law of physics that says our long-term assessment has to match that of the West. Just because you think it’s in our best interest doesn’t mean we have to.
Do we have a good reason to assume that the people at the Cyberspace Administration of China are open and transparent about their long-term assessments?
What kind of experts do you think would say something different publically if such assessments play into their policy?
This suggests that Beijing is making regulations that are driven by short-term thinking and not careful thinking over longer timelines.
Generally, my perspective of Chinese decision-making is that government policy is written by people who are able to think over longer timelines.
To me “AGI has to be aligned with CEV” and the sentence of “AGI has to be aligned with socialist values” sound very similar to me. Anything that’s an existential threat to humanity is also an existential threat to the CCP.
If the US would create similar rules and enforce them it would do a lot more than the six-month training pause. The rules prevent the training of large language models based on random internet data and allow only training it on high-quality data.
If you want to slow down dangerous AI development but not slow down AI alignment work, those policies sound a lot smarter than what the letter calling for the AI training pause calls for.
No, but they might say “There’s a call for US labs to stop training larger AI models, can we take actions to support that proposal to slow down US AI development? Our analysts at the Cyberspace Administration of China believe that AI could be very dangerous if its development isn’t well regulated. Can we push for an international treaty that makes the recommendations of the Cyberspace Administration of China also binding on other countries?”
Chinese experts simply don’t think it’s a real issue yet. There is no law of physics that says our long-term assessment has to match that of the West. Just because you think it’s in our best interest doesn’t mean we have to.
Do we have a good reason to assume that the people at the Cyberspace Administration of China are open and transparent about their long-term assessments?
What kind of experts do you think would say something different publically if such assessments play into their policy?