I think it’s worth updating on the fact that the US government has already launched a massive, disruptive, costly, unprecedented policy of denying AI-training chips to China. I’m not aware of any similar-magnitude measure happening in the GoF domain.
IMO that should end the debate about whether the government will treat AI dev the way it has GoF—it already has moved it to a different reference class.
Some wild speculation on upstream attributes of advanced AI’s reference class that might explain the difference in the USG’s approach:
a perception of new AI as geoeconomically disruptive; that new AI has more obvious natsec-relevant use-cases than GoF; that powerful AI is more culturally salient than powerful bio (“evil robots are scarier than evil germs”).
Not all of these are cause for optimism re: a global ASI ban, but (by selection) they point to governments treating AI “seriously”.
I think it’s worth updating on the fact that the US government has already launched a massive, disruptive, costly, unprecedented policy of denying AI-training chips to China. I’m not aware of any similar-magnitude measure happening in the GoF domain.
IMO that should end the debate about whether the government will treat AI dev the way it has GoF—it already has moved it to a different reference class.
Some wild speculation on upstream attributes of advanced AI’s reference class that might explain the difference in the USG’s approach:
a perception of new AI as geoeconomically disruptive; that new AI has more obvious natsec-relevant use-cases than GoF; that powerful AI is more culturally salient than powerful bio (“evil robots are scarier than evil germs”).
Not all of these are cause for optimism re: a global ASI ban, but (by selection) they point to governments treating AI “seriously”.