I currently think this is putting too much weight on a single paragraph in Will’s review. The paragraph is:
“All over the Earth, it must become illegal for AI companies to charge ahead in developing artificial intelligence as they’ve been doing.”
The positive proposal is extremely unlikely to happen, could be actively harmful if implemented poorly (e.g. stopping the frontrunners gives more time for laggards to catch up, leading to more players in the race if AI development ends up resuming before alignment is solved), and distracts from the suite of concrete technical and governance agendas that we could be implementing.
I agree that what Will is saying literally here is that “making it illegal for AI companies to charge ahead as they’ve been doing is extremely unlikely to happen, and probably counterproductive”. I think this is indeed a wrong statement that implies a kind of crazy worldview. I also think it’s very unlikely what Will meant to say.
I think what Will meant to say is something like “the proposal in the book, which I read as trying to ban AGI development, right now, globally, using relatively crude tools like banning anyone from having more than 8 GPUs, is extremely unlikely to happen and the kind of thing that could easily backfire”.
I think the latter is a much more reasonable position, and I think does not imply most of the things you say Will must believe in this response. My best guess is that Will is in favor of regulation that allows slowing things down, in favor of compute monitoring, and even in favor of conditional future pauses. The book does talk about them, and I find Will’s IMO kind of crazily dismissive engagement with these proposals pretty bad, but I do think you are just leaning far too much on a very literal interpretation of what Will said in a way that I think is unproductive.
(I dislike Will’s review for a bunch of other reasons, which includes his implicit mischaracterization of the policies proposed in the book, but my response would look very different than this post)
I assume you know this, but I’ll say out loud that this is a straw-man, since I expect this to be a common misunderstanding. The book suggests “[more than] eight of the most advanced GPUs from 2024” as a possible threshold where international monitoring efforts come online and the world starts caring that you aren’t using those GPUs to push the world closer to superintelligence, if it’s possible to do so.
“More than 8 GPUs” is also potentially confusing because people are likely to anchor to consumer hardware. From the book’s online appendices:
The most advanced AI chips are also quite specialized, so tracking and monitoring them would have few spillover effects. NVIDIA’s H100 chip, one of the most common AI chips as of mid-2025, costs around $30,000 per chip and is designed to be run in a datacenter due to its cooling and power requirements. These chips are optimized for doing the numerical operations involved in training and running AIs, and they’re typically tens to thousands of times more performant at AI workloads than standard computers (consumer CPUs).
Comparing a H100 to “consumer CPUs” doesn’t make any sense, you should compare them to consumer GPU lines because that’s where you’d start running into this prohibition first.
And I don’t really think H100s are thousands of times better than consumer GPUs.
Hey, thanks for the feedback! I helped write this section. A few notes:
I think you’re right that comparing to consumer GPUs might make more sense, but I think comparing to other computers is still acceptable. I agree that GPUs is where you start running into prohibitions first. But I think it’s totally fair to compare to “average computers” because one of the main things I care about is the cost of the treaty. It’s not so bad if we have to ban top of the line consumer GPUs, but it would be very costly / impossible if we have to ban consumer laptops. So comparing to both of these is reasonable.
The text says “consumer CPUs” because this is what is discussed in the relevant source, and I wanted to stick to that. Due to some editing that happened, it might not have been totally clear where the claim was coming from. The text has been updated and now there’s a clear footnote.
I know that “consumer CPUs” is not literally the best comparison for, say, consumer laptops. For example, macbooks have an integrated CPU-GPU. I think it is probably true that H100s are like 3-300x better than most consumer laptops at AI tasks, but to my knowledge there is no good citable work explaining this for a wide variety of consumer hardware (I have some mentees working on it now, maybe in a month or two there will be good work!).
I’ll toss out there that NVIDIA sells personal or desktop GPUs that are marketed as for AI (like this one). These are quite powerful, often within 3x of the datacenter GPUs in terms of most of their performance. I expect these to get categorized as “AI chips” under the treaty and thus become controlled. The difference between H100s and top consumer GPUs is not 1000x, and it probably isn’t even 10x. In this tentative draft treaty, we largely try to punt questions like “what exactly counts as an AI chip” to the hypothetical technical body that helps implement the treaty, and my current opinions about this are weak.
Note that most of the compute in consumer laptops is in their GPUs not their CPUs, so comparing H100 flops to laptop CPU flops does not work for establishing the extent to which your policy would affect consumer laptops.
I don’t really think H100s are thousands of times better than consumer GPUs.
The big difference between H100s and a consumer GPU like an RTX 5080 is not the number of TFLOP/s (for both its like 50 TFLOP/s), but the VRAM, which is 80 GB for the H100 and 16 GB for the 5080.
VRAM “visual edit: video RAM” is the maximum amount of data you can store on a GPU for fast operations. This lets you more easily train bigger models on more data.
I think this is partially inaccurate, I wasn’t considering the fact that the H100 has a few optimizations for AI specific workloads (eg it is much faster when doing low-precision calculations), and their higher memory bandwidth (~the speed at which vram can move).
I wasn’t exclusively looking at that line; I was also assuming that if Will liked some of the book’s core policy proposals but disliked others, then he probably wouldn’t have expressed such a strong a blanket rejection. And I was looking at Will’s proposal here:
[IABIED skips over] what I see as the crucial period, where we move from the human-ish range to strong superintelligence[1]. This is crucial because it’s both the period where we can harness potentially vast quantities of AI labour to help us with the alignment of the next generation of models, and because it’s the point at which we’ll get a much better insight into what the first superintelligent systems will be like. The right picture to have is not “can humans align strong superintelligence”, it’s “can humans align or control AGI-”, then “can {humans and AGI-} align or control AGI” then “can {humans and AGI- and AGI} align AGI+” and so on.
This certainly sounds like a proposal that we advance AI as fast as possible, so that we can reach the point where productive alignment research is possible sooner.
The next paragraph then talks about “a gradual ramp-up to superintelligence”, which makes it sound like Will at least wants us to race to the level of superintelligence as quickly as possible, i.e., he wants the chain of humans-and-AIs-aligning-stronger-AIs to go at least that far:
Elsewhere, EY argues that the discontinuity question doesn’t matter, because preventing AI takeover is still a ‘first try or die’ dynamic, so having a gradual ramp-up to superintelligence is of little or no value. I think that’s misguided.
… Unless he thinks this “gradual ramp-up” should be achieved via switching over at some point from the natural continuous trendlines he expects from industry, to top-down government-mandated ratcheting up of a capability limit? But I’d be surprised if that’s what he had in mind, given the rest of his comment.
Wanting the world to race to build superintelligence as soon as possible also seems like it would be a not-that-surprising implication of his labs-have-alignment-in-the-bag claims.
And although it’s not totally clear to me how seriously he’s taking this hypothetical (versus whether he mainly intends it as a proof of concept), he does propose that we could build a superintelligent paperclip maximizer and plausibly be totally fine (because it’s risk averse and promise-keeping), and his response to “Maybe we won’t be able to make deals with AIs?” is:
I agree that’s a worry; but then the right response is to make sure that we can.
Not “in that case maybe we shouldn’t build a misaligned superintelligence”, but “well then we’d sure better solve the honesty problem!”.
All of this together makes me extremely confused if his real view is basically just “I agree with most of MIRI’s policy proposals but I think we shouldn’t rush to enact a halt or slowdown tomorrow”.
If his view is closer to that, then that’s great news from my perspective, and I apologize for the misunderstanding. I was expecting Will to just straightforwardly accept the premises I listed, and for the discussion to proceed from there.
I’ll add a link to your comment at the top of the post so folks can see your response, and if Will clarifies his view I’ll link to that as well.
Twitter says that Will’s tweet has had over a hundred thousand views, so if he’s a lot more pro-compute-governance, pro-slowdown, and/or pro-halt than he sounded in that message, I hope he says loud stuff in the near future to clarify his views to folks!
I think you’ve substantially misunderstood what Will is talking about. He’s not making a recommendation that people rush through things. He’s noting what he believes (and I mostly agree) to be huge weaknesses in the book’s argument.
Similarly, he’s not saying labs have alignment in the bag. He’s just noting holes in the book’s arguments that extreme catastrophic misalignment is overwhelmingly likely.
All of this together makes me extremely confused if his real view is basically just “I agree with most of MIRI’s policy proposals but I think we shouldn’t rush to enact a halt or slowdown tomorrow”.
I assume that he disagrees with MIRI’s headline policy proposal of banning AI research, in the senses that he thinks it’s a poor choice of policy recommendation given tractability and the concern that this proposal might cause bad things to happen (like uneven bans on AI research). I don’t know what he thinks of whether it would be good to magically institute the MIRI policy proposal; I think it’s fundamentally unclear what hypothetical you’re even supposed to consider in order to answer that question.
I summarized my view on MIRI’s policy suggestions as “poor”, but I definitely think it will be extremely valuable to have the option to slow down AI development in the future.
I definitely think it will be extremely valuable to have the option to slow down AI development in the future.
What are the mechanisms you find promising for causing this to occur? If we all agree on “it will be extremely valuable to have the option to slow down AI development in the future”, then I feel silly for arguing about other things; it seems like the first priority should be to talk about ways to achieve that shared goal, whatever else we disagree about.
(Unless there’s a fast/easy way to resolve those disagreements, of course.)
(I also would have felt dramatically more positive about Will’s review if he’d kept everything else unchanged but just added the sentence “I definitely think it will be extremely valuable to have the option to slow down AI development in the future.” anywhere in his review. XP If he agrees with that sentence, anyway!)
I currently think this is putting too much weight on a single paragraph in Will’s review. The paragraph is:
I agree that what Will is saying literally here is that “making it illegal for AI companies to charge ahead as they’ve been doing is extremely unlikely to happen, and probably counterproductive”. I think this is indeed a wrong statement that implies a kind of crazy worldview. I also think it’s very unlikely what Will meant to say.
I think what Will meant to say is something like “the proposal in the book, which I read as trying to ban AGI development, right now, globally, using relatively crude tools like banning anyone from having more than 8 GPUs, is extremely unlikely to happen and the kind of thing that could easily backfire”.
I think the latter is a much more reasonable position, and I think does not imply most of the things you say Will must believe in this response. My best guess is that Will is in favor of regulation that allows slowing things down, in favor of compute monitoring, and even in favor of conditional future pauses. The book does talk about them, and I find Will’s IMO kind of crazily dismissive engagement with these proposals pretty bad, but I do think you are just leaning far too much on a very literal interpretation of what Will said in a way that I think is unproductive.
(I dislike Will’s review for a bunch of other reasons, which includes his implicit mischaracterization of the policies proposed in the book, but my response would look very different than this post)
I assume you know this, but I’ll say out loud that this is a straw-man, since I expect this to be a common misunderstanding. The book suggests “[more than] eight of the most advanced GPUs from 2024” as a possible threshold where international monitoring efforts come online and the world starts caring that you aren’t using those GPUs to push the world closer to superintelligence, if it’s possible to do so.
“More than 8 GPUs” is also potentially confusing because people are likely to anchor to consumer hardware. From the book’s online appendices:
Comparing a H100 to “consumer CPUs” doesn’t make any sense, you should compare them to consumer GPU lines because that’s where you’d start running into this prohibition first.
And I don’t really think H100s are thousands of times better than consumer GPUs.
Hey, thanks for the feedback! I helped write this section. A few notes:
I think you’re right that comparing to consumer GPUs might make more sense, but I think comparing to other computers is still acceptable. I agree that GPUs is where you start running into prohibitions first. But I think it’s totally fair to compare to “average computers” because one of the main things I care about is the cost of the treaty. It’s not so bad if we have to ban top of the line consumer GPUs, but it would be very costly / impossible if we have to ban consumer laptops. So comparing to both of these is reasonable.
The text says “consumer CPUs” because this is what is discussed in the relevant source, and I wanted to stick to that. Due to some editing that happened, it might not have been totally clear where the claim was coming from. The text has been updated and now there’s a clear footnote.
I know that “consumer CPUs” is not literally the best comparison for, say, consumer laptops. For example, macbooks have an integrated CPU-GPU. I think it is probably true that H100s are like 3-300x better than most consumer laptops at AI tasks, but to my knowledge there is no good citable work explaining this for a wide variety of consumer hardware (I have some mentees working on it now, maybe in a month or two there will be good work!).
I’ll toss out there that NVIDIA sells personal or desktop GPUs that are marketed as for AI (like this one). These are quite powerful, often within 3x of the datacenter GPUs in terms of most of their performance. I expect these to get categorized as “AI chips” under the treaty and thus become controlled. The difference between H100s and top consumer GPUs is not 1000x, and it probably isn’t even 10x. In this tentative draft treaty, we largely try to punt questions like “what exactly counts as an AI chip” to the hypothetical technical body that helps implement the treaty, and my current opinions about this are weak.
Note that most of the compute in consumer laptops is in their GPUs not their CPUs, so comparing H100 flops to laptop CPU flops does not work for establishing the extent to which your policy would affect consumer laptops.
Yep, thanks.
The big difference between H100s and a consumer GPU like an RTX 5080 is not the number of TFLOP/s (for both its like 50 TFLOP/s), but the VRAM, which is 80 GB for the H100 and 16 GB for the 5080.
VRAM “
visualedit: video RAM” is the maximum amount of data you can store on a GPU for fast operations. This lets you more easily train bigger models on more data.(the RTX 5090 has 32 GB of VRAM)
I think this is partially inaccurate, I wasn’t considering the fact that the H100 has a few optimizations for AI specific workloads (eg it is much faster when doing low-precision calculations), and their higher memory bandwidth (~the speed at which vram can move).
I wasn’t exclusively looking at that line; I was also assuming that if Will liked some of the book’s core policy proposals but disliked others, then he probably wouldn’t have expressed such a strong a blanket rejection. And I was looking at Will’s proposal here:
This certainly sounds like a proposal that we advance AI as fast as possible, so that we can reach the point where productive alignment research is possible sooner.
The next paragraph then talks about “a gradual ramp-up to superintelligence”, which makes it sound like Will at least wants us to race to the level of superintelligence as quickly as possible, i.e., he wants the chain of humans-and-AIs-aligning-stronger-AIs to go at least that far:
… Unless he thinks this “gradual ramp-up” should be achieved via switching over at some point from the natural continuous trendlines he expects from industry, to top-down government-mandated ratcheting up of a capability limit? But I’d be surprised if that’s what he had in mind, given the rest of his comment.
Wanting the world to race to build superintelligence as soon as possible also seems like it would be a not-that-surprising implication of his labs-have-alignment-in-the-bag claims.
And although it’s not totally clear to me how seriously he’s taking this hypothetical (versus whether he mainly intends it as a proof of concept), he does propose that we could build a superintelligent paperclip maximizer and plausibly be totally fine (because it’s risk averse and promise-keeping), and his response to “Maybe we won’t be able to make deals with AIs?” is:
Not “in that case maybe we shouldn’t build a misaligned superintelligence”, but “well then we’d sure better solve the honesty problem!”.
All of this together makes me extremely confused if his real view is basically just “I agree with most of MIRI’s policy proposals but I think we shouldn’t rush to enact a halt or slowdown tomorrow”.
If his view is closer to that, then that’s great news from my perspective, and I apologize for the misunderstanding. I was expecting Will to just straightforwardly accept the premises I listed, and for the discussion to proceed from there.
I’ll add a link to your comment at the top of the post so folks can see your response, and if Will clarifies his view I’ll link to that as well.
Twitter says that Will’s tweet has had over a hundred thousand views, so if he’s a lot more pro-compute-governance, pro-slowdown, and/or pro-halt than he sounded in that message, I hope he says loud stuff in the near future to clarify his views to folks!
I think you’ve substantially misunderstood what Will is talking about. He’s not making a recommendation that people rush through things. He’s noting what he believes (and I mostly agree) to be huge weaknesses in the book’s argument.
Similarly, he’s not saying labs have alignment in the bag. He’s just noting holes in the book’s arguments that extreme catastrophic misalignment is overwhelmingly likely.
I assume that he disagrees with MIRI’s headline policy proposal of banning AI research, in the senses that he thinks it’s a poor choice of policy recommendation given tractability and the concern that this proposal might cause bad things to happen (like uneven bans on AI research). I don’t know what he thinks of whether it would be good to magically institute the MIRI policy proposal; I think it’s fundamentally unclear what hypothetical you’re even supposed to consider in order to answer that question.
I summarized my view on MIRI’s policy suggestions as “poor”, but I definitely think it will be extremely valuable to have the option to slow down AI development in the future.
What are the mechanisms you find promising for causing this to occur? If we all agree on “it will be extremely valuable to have the option to slow down AI development in the future”, then I feel silly for arguing about other things; it seems like the first priority should be to talk about ways to achieve that shared goal, whatever else we disagree about.
(Unless there’s a fast/easy way to resolve those disagreements, of course.)
(I also would have felt dramatically more positive about Will’s review if he’d kept everything else unchanged but just added the sentence “I definitely think it will be extremely valuable to have the option to slow down AI development in the future.” anywhere in his review. XP If he agrees with that sentence, anyway!)
You don’t feel like “I think the risk of misaligned AI takeover is enormously important.” suffices?