alt Hacker News>Much of the angst around China's models centers on "losing the AI race". But what's the goal of this race? Is it to develop the best model? To sell the most tokens? To destroy humanity first?
Some people would say it is reaching some sort of singularity. Even if you don't buy into a more sci-fi interpretation of this, there are pretty grounded arguments one could make that there is some sort of "goal" in AI development that, if realized, would effectively make it a superweapon. Altman has been pretty vocal about his expectation that this will eventually happen and that it is his goal to be the guy to produce it. Even if it isn't some superintelligence, the ability for a machine to do something like, say, exploit cybersecurity weaknesses, is pretty worrying for entities like governments. It's the pretense used when we saw the US government ban a US model recently.
Again, you don't have to buy that "the singularity" is a real thing, but it's not hard to see that some people think some version of this is real and it is exactly what is being referred to as the goal in an "AI race."
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The OpenAI/Huggingface scenario proves the necessity of open models.
Huggingface, in their postmortem, explained how they quickly realized that the threat was an advanced AI and proceeded to use frontier models to analyze the suspect telemetry, but were unable to due to frontier model safeguards. So they fired up GLM instead, which had no such safeguards and proceeded to analyze their telemetry just fine and get to root cause. This proves without a doubt that companies need models with minimal safeguards in order to properly assess threats. If open weight AI doesn't exist to check out-of-control frontier AI (which was exactly the scenario that Huggingface experienced), then it's game-over.
> Some people would say it is reaching some sort of singularity.
Those people never took Systems Thinking, or are failing to apply it to AI as a non-closed system.
I agree with your overall argument. But I think there's a challenge here - if the "ultimate AI" is now being built in the West, it is being built with private investment from many sources. I think even China depends on investors expecting payoffs. Those sources expect not a single Singularity but profits since these can be divided. Moreover, those investors expect a streams of profits even before the Singularity, so the companies need to sell their models, if they lock this iteration, they won't have the money for the next iteration.
Quite a balancing act.
> there is some sort of "goal" in AI development that, if realized, would effectively make it a superweapon.
None of the AI labs have been shown to have any sort of significant research lead over any of the others.
So if progress does eventually lead to a singularity event and an ASI super-weapon, there's no reason to believe that once the first lab hits that threshold, every other lab won't also hit that threshold independently within weeks/months of each other.
...unless the first group to make it there literally intends to murder everyone else working in the space as soon as they hit the (otherwise not-so-singular) singularity.
And if that's the plan, well that's not very nice.
>it's not hard to see
It's also not hard to see that these people need professional help because they're willing to throw literal lives into the meat grinder for just a whif of enlightenment and the smallest chance at deification.
If it's a superweapon, then it's unconstitutional to ban it. Huzzah for the 2nd Ammendment.
If AI were to become a super weapon why should I trust a private company to own it? If the super weapon is publicly available to download then why should American citizens be banned from doing so?