I agree that its very plausible that China would steal the weights of Agent-3 or Agent-4 after stealing Agent-2. This was a toss up when writing the story, we ultimately went with just stealing Agent-2 for a combination of reasons. From memory the most compelling were something like:
OpenBrain + the national security state can pretty quickly/​cheaply significantly increase the difficulty and importantly the lead time required for another weights theft.
Through 2027 China is only 2-3 months behind, so the upside from another weights theft (especially when you consider the lead time needed) is not worth the significantly increased cost from (1).
Something that is a bit more under-explored is the potential sabotage between the projects. We have the uncertain assumption that the efforts on both sides would roughly cancel out, but we were quite uncertain on the offense-defense balance. I think a more offense favored reality could change the story quite a bit, basically with the idea of MAIM slowing both sides down a bunch.
I agree that its very plausible that China would steal the weights of Agent-3 or Agent-4 after stealing Agent-2. This was a toss up when writing the story, we ultimately went with just stealing Agent-2 for a combination of reasons. From memory the most compelling were something like:
OpenBrain + the national security state can pretty quickly/​cheaply significantly increase the difficulty and importantly the lead time required for another weights theft.
Through 2027 China is only 2-3 months behind, so the upside from another weights theft (especially when you consider the lead time needed) is not worth the significantly increased cost from (1).
Something that is a bit more under-explored is the potential sabotage between the projects. We have the uncertain assumption that the efforts on both sides would roughly cancel out, but we were quite uncertain on the offense-defense balance. I think a more offense favored reality could change the story quite a bit, basically with the idea of MAIM slowing both sides down a bunch.