I don’t have a good sense of what the CCP’s ASI policy looks like whether they get B30As or not. But, just looking at how they handled COVID and similar things, one thing that does seem likely either way is that their response will be much more top-down / consistent / coordinated, relative to the US. “Consistent” doesn’t necessarily mean sane or good, of course.
So, I am sympathetic to the argument that the CCP could not possibly be worse than the US, but (a) things can always get worse and (b) selling the chips or otherwise relaxing export controls is an action that is hard to undo, and plausibly the effect is that it gives a superpower that is actually capable of strong coordination around building ASI the resources to do so.
Like, one way of looking at things is that the US is mostly not coordinating on AI right now in a real way, and any sane / actually-useful policy responses are far outside the Overton window. Whereas, for better or worse, CCP leadership wouldn’t blink or think twice about taking big actions like “strict tracking / monitoring / limits of all SoTA chips used for training runs” or “massive national mobilization to race towards ASI” if they became convinced that either of those things were in the national interest. And once they do pick a direction like that, they seem much more likely to commit and go hard in that direction than the U.S.
I don’t have a good sense of what the CCP’s ASI policy looks like whether they get B30As or not. But, just looking at how they handled COVID and similar things, one thing that does seem likely either way is that their response will be much more top-down / consistent / coordinated, relative to the US. “Consistent” doesn’t necessarily mean sane or good, of course.
So, I am sympathetic to the argument that the CCP could not possibly be worse than the US, but (a) things can always get worse and (b) selling the chips or otherwise relaxing export controls is an action that is hard to undo, and plausibly the effect is that it gives a superpower that is actually capable of strong coordination around building ASI the resources to do so.
Like, one way of looking at things is that the US is mostly not coordinating on AI right now in a real way, and any sane / actually-useful policy responses are far outside the Overton window. Whereas, for better or worse, CCP leadership wouldn’t blink or think twice about taking big actions like “strict tracking / monitoring / limits of all SoTA chips used for training runs” or “massive national mobilization to race towards ASI” if they became convinced that either of those things were in the national interest. And once they do pick a direction like that, they seem much more likely to commit and go hard in that direction than the U.S.