alt Hacker NewsNone of this works without buy-in from China. This isn't something private companies can decide. The US would need to sign a groundbreaking deal with China, equivalent to the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of the Cold War.
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When I was reading this I was chuckling to myself imagining how China would be interpreting it as they read it. It was something like: Fuck you.
I hope China tells him to go kick rocks. From everything that has happened, they are the only ones carrying the torch for humanity that have led us to having some semblance of a healthy open-source/open-weight ecosystem.
No one in China is carrying on like headless chickens about the world ending, either. They're rational pragmatists, getting things done.
Nothing says "Let's make a deal" like constantly insisting we are Good and they are Evil.
We'd have to make a deal with China and be confident they wouldn't cheat on it.
Genuinely I don't believe China is the impediment here, I believe the current US administration is.
Dario does a good job of addressing that in this essay. He lists several potential levels of global agreements that could be beneficial to all parties. For example, having models capable of bioterrorism hurts both the US and its “adversaries”. It’s likely we could get global agreement that these capabilities benefit nobody.
I believe Dario has good intentions regarding global agreements. However, I find it difficult believing government’s public statements will match their private behaviors. I would bet that the US government is developing models with potentially devastating capabilities because they cannot guarantee that other countries won’t do the same. Maybe we’ll end up having something like mutually assured destruction with AI models similar to what we have today with nuclear weapons.