Do you think the same for a company within the US? That with a 6 month, or even just a 3 month going off recent trends, lead it would find a way to sabotage other companies?
I think it’s plausible, but:
cyber attacks might be detectable and they’re unequivocally illegal
political manoeuvrings take time and there’s a pretty strong status quo bias in politics (hard to pass legislation)
and the govt typically doesn’t private companies to have monopolies on critical tech, and even with a private-public partnership my understanding is govt would want multiple companies involved
and the govt might get very involved if there’s a public-private partnership, which could threaten company leadership
(I think a remerging crux here might be the power of AI’s persuasion+strategy skills)
Yes, I do think the same for a company within the US. I think (a) it might be willing to do illegal things (companies do illegal things all the time when they think they can probably get away with it) and (b) some political maneuverings take very little time indeed; think about how much has happened in US politics since Trump took office less than a year ago. Elon’s star rose and fell for example, DOGE happened, etc. And this is in the before times; during the singularity there’ll be a general sense of crisis and emergency that makes 2025 feel like boring business as usual. A particular move I find all too plausible is “We should consolidate our compute into one big project, that shares model weights and info etc., so that we can go faster and beat china. (and, quietly, in the fine print, the AIs that should run on most of this compute should be the smartest ones and/or the people in charge should be the leadership of the most advanced company.)” In other words, we should basically grab all the compute from rival companies and give it to our project, though legally that’s not what’s happening and the narrative sugarcoats it.
Do you think the same for a company within the US? That with a 6 month, or even just a 3 month going off recent trends, lead it would find a way to sabotage other companies?
I think it’s plausible, but:
cyber attacks might be detectable and they’re unequivocally illegal
political manoeuvrings take time and there’s a pretty strong status quo bias in politics (hard to pass legislation)
and the govt typically doesn’t private companies to have monopolies on critical tech, and even with a private-public partnership my understanding is govt would want multiple companies involved
and the govt might get very involved if there’s a public-private partnership, which could threaten company leadership
(I think a remerging crux here might be the power of AI’s persuasion+strategy skills)
Yes, I do think the same for a company within the US. I think (a) it might be willing to do illegal things (companies do illegal things all the time when they think they can probably get away with it) and (b) some political maneuverings take very little time indeed; think about how much has happened in US politics since Trump took office less than a year ago. Elon’s star rose and fell for example, DOGE happened, etc. And this is in the before times; during the singularity there’ll be a general sense of crisis and emergency that makes 2025 feel like boring business as usual. A particular move I find all too plausible is “We should consolidate our compute into one big project, that shares model weights and info etc., so that we can go faster and beat china. (and, quietly, in the fine print, the AIs that should run on most of this compute should be the smartest ones and/or the people in charge should be the leadership of the most advanced company.)” In other words, we should basically grab all the compute from rival companies and give it to our project, though legally that’s not what’s happening and the narrative sugarcoats it.