The Bitter Lesson-pilled way to look at Nos. 1 and 3 is to realize that the bottleneck is compute not research:
1) In the medium term, the Chinese AI labs can’t win the race because they lack the chips to do so because of sanctions, therefore the question is moot. Theoretically and in the long term, AI alignment is viewed in China as alignment to the party agenda not to some “universal human values” (in a sense how it’s used in the West) which according to the Chinese state ideology do not exist.
3) As long as the top-2 frontier labs have similar capitalization and similar amount of funding available, they will have similar amount of compute and their RSI programs will be bottlenecked by that roughly equally. So as long as that holds, they will be in similar position, and note there’s no concrete “finish line” because the AI capabilities are jagged and will remain so.
I have not thought through how long will it hold though, presumably if one the AI labs folds financially (AI bubble hypothesis etc.) they might decidedly lose the race. But even then their alignment research might get published and used in the leading lab so it won’t be useless
The Bitter Lesson-pilled way to look at Nos. 1 and 3 is to realize that the bottleneck is compute not research:
1) In the medium term, the Chinese AI labs can’t win the race because they lack the chips to do so because of sanctions, therefore the question is moot. Theoretically and in the long term, AI alignment is viewed in China as alignment to the party agenda not to some “universal human values” (in a sense how it’s used in the West) which according to the Chinese state ideology do not exist.
3) As long as the top-2 frontier labs have similar capitalization and similar amount of funding available, they will have similar amount of compute and their RSI programs will be bottlenecked by that roughly equally. So as long as that holds, they will be in similar position, and note there’s no concrete “finish line” because the AI capabilities are jagged and will remain so.
I have not thought through how long will it hold though, presumably if one the AI labs folds financially (AI bubble hypothesis etc.) they might decidedly lose the race. But even then their alignment research might get published and used in the leading lab so it won’t be useless