Chip fabs are allowed to keep scaling up, but in a slow and highly regulated fashion, and besides, there isn’t as much demand now that AI capabilities are frozen.
This seems like a mistake. Whether plan S is good or bad will depend on if the conditions for AI development are better or worse when it finally ends. If fabs are allowed to scale up and research on how to make cheaper and more efficient chips is allowed to continue, then we’ll plausibly have much more compute and a much faster takeoff when plan S eventually ends, plausibly making it all net negative. Chip R&D in particular might actually be the most important thing here—Moore’s law continuing for several more decades would make takeoff much, much faster if it the deal eventually broke down.
Depending on how much political will there is (and in plan S there is presumably a lot!) I’d guess it’s better to go the other way and reduce chips and fab capacity, and to ban R&D into producing more efficient chips. So that if someone ever leaves the deal, it takes maximally long for the world to resume the singularity. (Leaving enough time to coordinate on another deal, or to do research, etc.)
In fact, if you expect non-tracked compute to decrease over time (e.g. culture change makes it more and more outrageous to hide chips; replacement of leadership and rank-and-file at various places give greater probability that someone changes their mind or leaks; it’s tempting to run the chips in ways that would degrade them or to sell them to buy-back programs; more total intelligence agency effort accumulating over time) then plausibly an “out” of plan S would be to restart the singularity a while later but with much less compute in the world, capping the speed of the singularity in a much more robust way than plan A.
I just noticed this part of plan S.
This seems like a mistake. Whether plan S is good or bad will depend on if the conditions for AI development are better or worse when it finally ends. If fabs are allowed to scale up and research on how to make cheaper and more efficient chips is allowed to continue, then we’ll plausibly have much more compute and a much faster takeoff when plan S eventually ends, plausibly making it all net negative. Chip R&D in particular might actually be the most important thing here—Moore’s law continuing for several more decades would make takeoff much, much faster if it the deal eventually broke down.
Depending on how much political will there is (and in plan S there is presumably a lot!) I’d guess it’s better to go the other way and reduce chips and fab capacity, and to ban R&D into producing more efficient chips. So that if someone ever leaves the deal, it takes maximally long for the world to resume the singularity. (Leaving enough time to coordinate on another deal, or to do research, etc.)
In fact, if you expect non-tracked compute to decrease over time (e.g. culture change makes it more and more outrageous to hide chips; replacement of leadership and rank-and-file at various places give greater probability that someone changes their mind or leaks; it’s tempting to run the chips in ways that would degrade them or to sell them to buy-back programs; more total intelligence agency effort accumulating over time) then plausibly an “out” of plan S would be to restart the singularity a while later but with much less compute in the world, capping the speed of the singularity in a much more robust way than plan A.