America is trying to sell Nvidia H20s to China and looks open to selling the vastly superior B20As to China as well despite this being an obviously crazy thing to do
It’s not a crazy thing to do if you don’t expect AGI soon (which is not a crazy expectation). China is not absurdly behind on AI chips and so might sufficiently catch up in a few years, with strong restrictions on chips motivating the development of domestic production. Actual compute that could be bought in 2024-2025 isn’t going to matter in 2035, but the level of domestic semiconductor industry in 2035 will. This is different when the critical year is 2027 rather than 2035, but it’s not obviously crazy to expect the critical year to be closer to 2035.
...and similarly, if this is the actual dynamic, then the US “AI Security” push towards export controls might just hurts the US comparatively speaking in 2035.
The export controls being useful really does seem predicated on short timelines to TAI; people should consider whether that is false.
In the last few years, as I read stuff about AI US vs. China in the blogosphere, I’ve always felt confused by this kind of question (exports to China or not? China this or that?). I really don’t have an intuition of what’s the right answer here. I’ve never thought about this deeply, so I’ll take the occasion to write down some thoughts.
Conditional on the scenario where dangerous AI/point of no return comes in 2035, if AI development continues to be free, so not because say it would come earlier but was regulated away:
Considering the question Q = “Is China at the edge with chips in 2035?”:
Then I consider three policies and write down P(Q|do(Policy)):
P(Q|free chips trade with China) = 30% P(Q|restrictions on exports to China of most powerful chips) = 50% P(Q|block all chips exports to China) = 80%
I totally made up these percentages; I guess my brain simply generated three ~evenly-spaced numbers in (0, 100).
Then the next question would be: what difference does Q make? Does it make a difference if China is at the same level of the US?
The US is totally able to create the problem in the first place from scratch in a unipolar world. Would an actually multipolar world be even worse? Or would it not make any difference, because the US is self-racing? Or would it have the opposite effect, where the US is forced to actually sit at a table?
It’s not a crazy thing to do if you don’t expect AGI soon (which is not a crazy expectation). China is not absurdly behind on AI chips and so might sufficiently catch up in a few years, with strong restrictions on chips motivating the development of domestic production. Actual compute that could be bought in 2024-2025 isn’t going to matter in 2035, but the level of domestic semiconductor industry in 2035 will. This is different when the critical year is 2027 rather than 2035, but it’s not obviously crazy to expect the critical year to be closer to 2035.
...and similarly, if this is the actual dynamic, then the US “AI Security” push towards export controls might just hurts the US comparatively speaking in 2035.
The export controls being useful really does seem predicated on short timelines to TAI; people should consider whether that is false.
In the last few years, as I read stuff about AI US vs. China in the blogosphere, I’ve always felt confused by this kind of question (exports to China or not? China this or that?). I really don’t have an intuition of what’s the right answer here. I’ve never thought about this deeply, so I’ll take the occasion to write down some thoughts.
Conditional on the scenario where dangerous AI/point of no return comes in 2035, if AI development continues to be free, so not because say it would come earlier but was regulated away:
Considering the question Q = “Is China at the edge with chips in 2035?”:
Then I consider three policies and write down P(Q|do(Policy)):
P(Q|free chips trade with China) = 30%
P(Q|restrictions on exports to China of most powerful chips) = 50%
P(Q|block all chips exports to China) = 80%
I totally made up these percentages; I guess my brain simply generated three ~evenly-spaced numbers in (0, 100).
Then the next question would be: what difference does Q make? Does it make a difference if China is at the same level of the US?
The US is totally able to create the problem in the first place from scratch in a unipolar world. Would an actually multipolar world be even worse? Or would it not make any difference, because the US is self-racing? Or would it have the opposite effect, where the US is forced to actually sit at a table?