1- China won’t be able to win the long timelines world many policymakers are planning for. The David Sacks/Jensen Hwang argument is that by precluding China from the best AI accelerators, they’ll eventually have their own domestic supply the U.S. can’t control. When that happens, the U.S. will have a robot army they can cheaply deploy to defend the Taiwan strait.
This only tracks under the assumption that militarily useful AI’s development will be dependent upon compute, that it will arrive before China catches up in terms of semiconductor production, and that, once it comes to exist, it will be difficult to cheaply replicate. I think a majority of non-Western world leaders don’t expect any of those three things to be true. Whether or not you agree with them, that’s a useful point of information for modeling their behavior.
As best I can tell, China sees the massive investment in training frontier LLMs to essentially be a waste of money. They’ll replicate the models from six months to a year ago just in case, since it’s cheap enough to do so and having them around for prestige has some value, but they don’t expect them to be the wonder-weapon that some in the U.S. expect them to be. Likewise, Russia has far fewer people on hand, and seems to prefer allocating their best researchers towards more conventional work (e.g. hypersonic missiles).
Essentially, the East is gambling that AGI happens later or more unconventionally, and, in that scenario, the West is just helpfully providing them with free as-good-as-open-source R&D.
5- Trumpism might be gone at the end of the decade and president Gavin Newsom might be much more willing to fight over Taiwan.
This seems incredibly implausible on multiple fronts.
“Trumpism” is just the rise in nationalism in the West that’s been going on since 2012 at the latest and shows no signs of slowing down. Motivated people have been predicting that “Trumpism will disappear by next year” since Trump first walked down the elevator.
Right-wing politicians are almost always more China-hawkish than left-wing ones. In any case, in a major war, they enjoy a much greater degree of faith from the pipe-hitters, which imposes a practical constraint on hawkishness.
This only tracks under the assumption that militarily useful AI’s development will be dependent upon compute, that it will arrive before China catches up in terms of semiconductor production, and that, once it comes to exist, it will be difficult to cheaply replicate. I think a majority of non-Western world leaders don’t expect any of those three things to be true. Whether or not you agree with them, that’s a useful point of information for modeling their behavior.
As best I can tell, China sees the massive investment in training frontier LLMs to essentially be a waste of money. They’ll replicate the models from six months to a year ago just in case, since it’s cheap enough to do so and having them around for prestige has some value, but they don’t expect them to be the wonder-weapon that some in the U.S. expect them to be. Likewise, Russia has far fewer people on hand, and seems to prefer allocating their best researchers towards more conventional work (e.g. hypersonic missiles).
Essentially, the East is gambling that AGI happens later or more unconventionally, and, in that scenario, the West is just helpfully providing them with free as-good-as-open-source R&D.
This seems incredibly implausible on multiple fronts.
“Trumpism” is just the rise in nationalism in the West that’s been going on since 2012 at the latest and shows no signs of slowing down. Motivated people have been predicting that “Trumpism will disappear by next year” since Trump first walked down the elevator.
Right-wing politicians are almost always more China-hawkish than left-wing ones. In any case, in a major war, they enjoy a much greater degree of faith from the pipe-hitters, which imposes a practical constraint on hawkishness.