Separately from gwern’s argument, I say that maintaining the gap is still of vital national interest. As an example, one of the arguments in favor of nuclear testing bans is that it unilaterally favors American nuclear supremacy, because only the US has the computational resources to conduct simulations good enough to be used in engineering new weapons.
That logic was applied to Russia, but the same logic applies to China: advanced simulations are useful for almost every dimension of military competition. If they let advanced compute go, that means that the US will be multiple qualitative generations ahead in terms of our ability to simulate, predict, and test-without-risk.
This is a terrible position to be in, geopolitically.
Separately from gwern’s argument, I say that maintaining the gap is still of vital national interest. As an example, one of the arguments in favor of nuclear testing bans is that it unilaterally favors American nuclear supremacy, because only the US has the computational resources to conduct simulations good enough to be used in engineering new weapons.
That logic was applied to Russia, but the same logic applies to China: advanced simulations are useful for almost every dimension of military competition. If they let advanced compute go, that means that the US will be multiple qualitative generations ahead in terms of our ability to simulate, predict, and test-without-risk.
This is a terrible position to be in, geopolitically.