alt Hacker NewsWe, globally, can stop it. It has worked (so far) for nuclear disarmament, and could work for training large models. I know that policing the usage of computer clusters is not a popular opinion in technical forums, but something has to be done.
Specially when talking about potential superintelligences. And if people think that's impossible, remember that current models would have been considered science fiction just a few years ago.
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It hasn't worked for nuclear disarmament. We live in a world where many countries have nuclear arsenals. "But it hasn't killed us yet!" Yeah sure, it's only been less than a century since they were invented. Who knows when nuclear war will come?
with nukes you can regulate the inputs because its physically impossible to build one without uranium or some other fissile material. they also give off radiation making it easier to detect. its hard to make them in secret when you need mines, big enrichment facilities and years of research with hundreds of engineers where just one of them can leak the whole thing.
training llms only takes compute and memory. two things that are basically everywhere. even if you somehow stopped making new gpus today theres still millions of them out there and its possible to start a secret production line. you can maybe try some controls at the tooling and chemical level but look what happened with asml and huawei.
the only thing you can really do is find and stop large data centers that are built out in public. nothing outside of political pressure works against secret operations in a fortified bunker or any form of distributed training. if a "rogue state" like north korea decides to make skynet they will eventually get it as long as their engineers know what there doing.
and the best way to fight bad X {ai, tech, religion, politics} has always been good X, not no X. in this case thats open source models, coming out of china or europe or anywhere else. thats the real answer.
are you going to nuke China when they predictably ignore you? what the fuck are you going to do, tariff them? lol.
I don't buy the superintelligence package, but I think uncritical LLM adoption poses plenty of threats to things I care about, in a mundane human-scale way.
Anyhow, I think you're (absolutely! ugh) right about the politics and I try to make the same point to people: whether you love or hate LLMs, accepting the "inevitabilism" framing is just ceding control of the Overton window. For better or worse, technology adoption can be and has been slowed by politics. We don't have nuclear plants everywhere. We don't have Project Orion starships colonizing Mars. We still have very strong social stigmas against genetic selection for human embryos, etc. This all can change in a heartbeat, and I'm not sure that policing the hardware rather than holding specific humans accountable for bad LLM outcomes is productive, but fundamentally: yes, we can stop it.