Many would reply that these restrictions on dissemination of knowledge will drastically slow down AI research. Yes: the drastic slowing constitutes most of the benefit of imposing the restrictions.
Plan A largely doesn’t agree with this. Since they expect the slowdown treaty to eventually fall apart—at which point we revert to the status quo arms race, which we all agree is bad—they argue for slowing only insofar as it allows alignment research to outpace general AI research.
Plan A also seems to largely discount the possibility of smaller research labs discovering some new paradigm that is capable of becoming an ASI without massive amounts of compute. I largely agree with this view, since ~90% of algorithmic progress is scale/compute-dependent, but either way this seems like an important crux.
Plan A largely doesn’t agree with this. Since they expect the slowdown treaty to eventually fall apart—at which point we revert to the status quo arms race, which we all agree is bad—they argue for slowing only insofar as it allows alignment research to outpace general AI research.
Scott Alexander had a nice little graphic on this point in his ACX post on Plan A:
Plan A also seems to largely discount the possibility of smaller research labs discovering some new paradigm that is capable of becoming an ASI without massive amounts of compute. I largely agree with this view, since ~90% of algorithmic progress is scale/compute-dependent, but either way this seems like an important crux.