I would summarize it to conclude: The āAI arms raceā is not an objective technological fact so much as a politically useful narrative that has helped align government policy with the interests of large AI companies.
My opinion is that we should be a lot more critical of this narrative.
I am definitely going to read that link, from the start at 1.0, but now right now. Thanks, though.
Accepting your summary (and sorry if I ask a question answered in the link) but what would an āobjective technological factā regarding any technology being an arms race look like? As in, it seems obvious that a technology that can perform complex exploits of software vulnerabilities without human assistance could be used as a weapon-- so why wouldnāt that be a national concern to ensure America has the better technology? How is this different than missiles or bombs, from a technological standpoint?
To be fair, an AI system capable of independently discovering and exploiting serious software vulnerabilities would be a legitimate national-security concern. The US would have a strong interest in possessing and defending against that capability.
But a technology is not itself an arms race. An arms race is a pattern of behavior between adversaries involving that technology. That requires observable political, military and economic facts.
I would point these out as red flags:
Developing identifiable autonomous cyberweapons.
Each side expands its program substantially because it believes the other is expanding.
Established military units, budgets, infrastructure and deployment plans around those systems.
I would point these out as not counting:
AI can be weaponized.
China is developing AI.
AI could confer military advantages.
American companies are spending heavily on general-purpose models.
The United States wants to lead commercially.
In table format, the comparison between AI and those other technologies would ideally look something like this:
An AI arms race would look very different than what we see right now.
With the AI bubble, the communities being disrupted by the environmental impacts of data centers (including infranoise), the constant fear of āuse AI or be replaced by AI,ā the risky financials on all of this, ā¦ all the people that lost retirement value to the SpaceX IPO, ā¦ this stuff is a serious public nuisance.
We donāt need tech CEOs scaring us with talk of an āarms race.ā Itās fucked up.
They discuss a lot of the same points I would, right there. The incentives of AI leaders, Chinas current position, the lies from AI companies to communities, the way their stories change, the fact that theyāre the ones calling it an āarms race.ā
I would alternatively ask this: what expertise claims we are in an arms race? AI companies donāt count as expertise on global arms races, in what I think is a reasonable opinion.
There are several problems here. If you address them, Iām happy to answer your question faithfully. But as it stands, I donāt think itās a fair comparison.
First and foremost, weāre specifically discussing an āarms race,ā not just a ārace.ā I fail to understand what qualifies an AI company to be an expert in national security, weapons, and foreign affairs. To me, an AI company is an expert in what makes them more profit. That just so happens to involve AI here, but not āarms races.ā
Second, doctors are probably not necessarily experts on vaccines. Theyāre likely to be experts on vaccine benefits, recommendation, procurement, administering, storage, ā¦ but thatās just administration and some operational knowledge. A vaccine expert (IMO) is a specialist for vaccines. Theyāre probably not working in a hospital.
A pharmaceutical company might be an expert on vaccines. But whatās the parallel to AI companies? Pharmaceutical companies research and develop actual vaccines. AI companies do not research and develop arms. The only argument I understand for this would be to say that an LLM is a weapon.
I donāt buy that an LLM is a weapon. Real competition exists, and certain military applications could become arms races, but AI as a whole is not one. Building out swaths of data centers to power more AI without a concrete public benefit isnāt something we should put up with.
You donāt benefit from the narrative that this is an arms race, not as an individual or a citizen. The benefactors here are the AI companies.
The technology can certainly be used as a weapon; it can hack systems already, and defend against hacks. This capability will only increase, and logically the better AI affords a strategic benefit. Hence, an arms race.
The rest of your questions arenāt questions or presuppose that AI canāt be used as a weapon.
In case it isnāt obvious, there are experts in this field that arenāt employed by AI.
The term āarms raceā has a definition and Iām pretty sure this still doesnāt apply. So in my opinion, even at best, this is political propaganda.
An āarms raceā is a competition over the quality or quantity of military capabilities between states in the international system.
The US and China are in an economic race. We arenāt racing to develop a particular military capability. Nobody can even name what that capability would beā¦ āmass hacking?ā Is that it? Sounds scaryā¦ I donāt buy it. It gives me the impression of fear mongering.
If it were about AI driven military capabilities, we could have probably worked with the compute we had years ago.
I think what should be obvious is the fact that ācan be used as a weaponā doesnāt justify it being an āarm.ā The fact that they can āhackā now is largely irrelevant. Itās a nice talking point that was parroted around the AI circle jerk recently, but largely unsubstantiated. I think they all caught on to the hype Mythos was getting, so they took the narrative for another spin. But even Mythos was a load of propaganda.
How do you know it wasnāt conveniently allowed to happen, to further fuel the propaganda machine? How do you know they didnāt exaggerate or leave blank important details, particularly because theyāre financially incentivized to maintain the hype?
State actors have always hacked one another. Now with a fancy tool to do automated discovery, they might be a little faster. But that speed is also arguable, because there are reports on how AI led development actually shifts the development time burden rather than resolving it.
In case it isnāt obvious, there are experts in this field that arenāt employed by AI.
Those experts in the field (that arenāt employed by AI) mostly agree with this stance, from what I can tell.
I ran the report through AI (the irony is not lost on me) and while itās really very clear this is closer to a manifesto than a unbiased report (not that it claims to be unbiased), I donāt strictly disagree with any specific point.
I have several thoughts, however:
If you donāt think having a legion of skilled hackers that never sleep is a weapon, fine-- hell, even if you tighten your tinfoil hat and reject the claim that they can even do that, if the American government and the Chinese government both believe it has this capability, and they both believe itās advantage to have the better technology, then this is an arms race. Even if theyāre both wrong about the capabilities of AI or the plausibility of AGI, its still an arms race. If the it turned out that atomic bombs werenāt feasible or possible to create, that wouldnāt have made the race to build one less of an arms race, without hindsight.
If not clear, I donāt believe a conspiracy on this scale is a realistic assumption without more data than āI donāt believe itā. It would have to spread across several competing companies throughout most, if not all, of the employees.
Like I said in the first comment, Sanders can threaten all he wants, but I just donāt believe Congress is going to take a risk on āits not really that importantā and impose restrictions on AI development. (Side note that no restrictions on AI development is not the same as no restrictions on AI use or deployment.)
I think, as I said before, that we will need a global treaty on pausing development before any one country or company pauses development, or even slows it down.
If you donāt think having a legion of skilled hackers that never sleep is a weapon, fine-- hell, even if you tighten your tinfoil hat and reject the claim that they can even do that,
Let me tighten my tinfoil hat, really quickly. First and foremost, itās great claims which require equally great evidence. The onus of evidencing (or lack thereof) ānever sleeping skilled hacking machinesā belongs to the AI companies, not me. So far itās unsubstantiated. What we really ought be discussing is the plausibility of such a machine, given what we already know.
Thatās a whole discussion in itself, which Iām happy to have. I digress, for now.
if the American government and the Chinese government both believe it has this capability, and they both believe itās advantage to have the better technology, then thisĀ isĀ an arms race.
We have not met that definition, in my opinion. I donāt believe even the US government is convinced of this. In fact, Iām doubtful anyone is fully convinced.
The Manhattan Project was an arms race between the USSR and the US, which this AI race looks nothing like. We didnāt have to rely on CEOs to tell us as much, either.
I think the US and China were once in recent time more bought into the idea that the recent LLM (and more deeply, the transformer and attention) innovations might lead to more breakthroughs with military applications. Those breakthroughs have been sparse and rather not up to par, like a theoretical never-sleeping-hacking-machine would be. I certainly donāt see any grand scale race between them, militarily speaking. So noā¦ just as (if China were) foreign competition during combustion engine development, I wouldnāt consider that an āarms race.ā Especially if the largest surface area in the field was disparate competitors in the market of business to consumer goods.
Whereās the military research programs actually treating this like a priority? DARPA for AI would be something that comes to mind, not thisā¦ would this really be the best that the US has to offer in its supposed āarms race?ā
Even if theyāre both wrong about the capabilities of AI or the plausibility of AGI, itāsĀ stillĀ an arms race. If the it turned out that atomic bombs werenāt feasible or possible to create, that wouldnāt have made the race to build one less of an arms race, without hindsight.
Iām arguing that most the reasons itās a race are political and economical. My issue is with the word āarms.ā I would still say it is not an arms race.
If not clear, I donāt believe a conspiracy on this scale is a realistic assumption without more data than āI donāt believe itā. It would have to spread across several competing companies throughout most, if not all, of the employees.
I also donāt believe in a grand conspiracy. My belief is closer to cultural stupidity having gone āoff the rails.ā
Itās propaganda, CEOs hemorrhaging cash, people buying into the propaganda, every small win gets exacerbated while loses ignored.
My position isnāt unconventional or all that unreasonable, really. Itās a growing position, per my own observations. Whatās happening isnāt right.
I think, as I said before, that we will need a global treaty on pausing development before any one country or company pauses development, or even slows it down.
I still say we should worry about ourselves first. That narrative only benefits the tech CEOs. Slowing down now means we can preserve livelihood, plan better, not blow trillions more dollars, and eventually speed back up without risk of crashing.
Right now, the current trajectory causes harm in peopleās lives. I donāt buy the argument that this is acceptable without discussion, and that AI companies should get to pick that for us through their pushed narratives.
I also donāt buy that our current trajectory is optimal for arriving at some grander finish line. If you stop and readjust, you might actually ābeat Chinaā (for whatever thatās worth).
The onus of evidencing (or lack thereof) ānever sleeping skilled hacking machinesā belongs to the AI companies, not me. So far itās unsubstantiated.
What, hypothetically, would that look like?
We have not met that definition, in my opinion. I donāt believe even the US government is convinced of this. In fact, Iām doubtful anyone is fully convinced.
Based on what? Theyāre certainly behaving in that manner.
I certainly donāt see any grand scale race between them, militarily speaking.
This should make a global treaty relatively easy, if, as you say, no party actually believes there is a threat.
Whereās the military research programs actually treating this like a priority?
Youād expect to know about them if they existed?
Iām arguing that most the reasons itās a race are political and economical. My issue is with the word āarms.ā I would still say it is not an arms are.
Are the specific semantics important?
I also donāt believe in a grand conspiracy. My belief is closer to cultural stupidity having gone āoff the rails.ā
You do if you are claiming that the known hacks from AI companies arenāt real, and that LLMs donāt even have that capability. Consider how many people would have to be in on it to sustain that fabrication.
My position isnāt unconventional or all that unreasonable, really. Itās a growing position, per my own observations.
I mean absolutely no disrespect or insult, but an antivaxxer could say that same exact thing. They likewise do not think their stance is unconventional or unreasonable, and, to our sorrow, it is a growing position.
I still say we should worry about ourselves first.
Yes, but thereās a subtle begging the question in this statement. If it is an arms race, āworrying about ourselvesā would be continuing on developing AI at a breakneck speed. Only if we assume your stance is correct does that sentence mean slowing down.
Right now, the current trajectory causes harm in peopleās lives. I donāt buy the argument that this is acceptable without discussion
Without discussion, or without coming to the conclusion you want? I think thereās quite a bit of discussion.
What expertise are you drawing from to come to this conclusion?
Hereās a decent resource if you care to read about, rather than the podcast: https://ainowinstitute.org/publications/research/1-3-ai-arms-race-2-0-from-deregulation-to-industrial-policy
I would summarize it to conclude: The āAI arms raceā is not an objective technological fact so much as a politically useful narrative that has helped align government policy with the interests of large AI companies.
My opinion is that we should be a lot more critical of this narrative.
I am definitely going to read that link, from the start at 1.0, but now right now. Thanks, though.
Accepting your summary (and sorry if I ask a question answered in the link) but what would an āobjective technological factā regarding any technology being an arms race look like? As in, it seems obvious that a technology that can perform complex exploits of software vulnerabilities without human assistance could be used as a weapon-- so why wouldnāt that be a national concern to ensure America has the better technology? How is this different than missiles or bombs, from a technological standpoint?
To be fair, an AI system capable of independently discovering and exploiting serious software vulnerabilities would be a legitimate national-security concern. The US would have a strong interest in possessing and defending against that capability.
But a technology is not itself an arms race. An arms race is a pattern of behavior between adversaries involving that technology. That requires observable political, military and economic facts.
I would point these out as red flags:
I would point these out as not counting:
In table format, the comparison between AI and those other technologies would ideally look something like this:
An AI arms race would look very different than what we see right now.
With the AI bubble, the communities being disrupted by the environmental impacts of data centers (including infranoise), the constant fear of āuse AI or be replaced by AI,ā the risky financials on all of this, ā¦ all the people that lost retirement value to the SpaceX IPO, ā¦ this stuff is a serious public nuisance.
We donāt need tech CEOs scaring us with talk of an āarms race.ā Itās fucked up.
Hereās a really good podcast on the subject: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-ezra-klein-show/id1548604447?i=1000779843294
They discuss a lot of the same points I would, right there. The incentives of AI leaders, Chinas current position, the lies from AI companies to communities, the way their stories change, the fact that theyāre the ones calling it an āarms race.ā
I would alternatively ask this: what expertise claims we are in an arms race? AI companies donāt count as expertise on global arms races, in what I think is a reasonable opinion.
Do doctors and pharmaceutical companies count as experts when discussing vaccines?
There are several problems here. If you address them, Iām happy to answer your question faithfully. But as it stands, I donāt think itās a fair comparison.
First and foremost, weāre specifically discussing an āarms race,ā not just a ārace.ā I fail to understand what qualifies an AI company to be an expert in national security, weapons, and foreign affairs. To me, an AI company is an expert in what makes them more profit. That just so happens to involve AI here, but not āarms races.ā
Second, doctors are probably not necessarily experts on vaccines. Theyāre likely to be experts on vaccine benefits, recommendation, procurement, administering, storage, ā¦ but thatās just administration and some operational knowledge. A vaccine expert (IMO) is a specialist for vaccines. Theyāre probably not working in a hospital.
A pharmaceutical company might be an expert on vaccines. But whatās the parallel to AI companies? Pharmaceutical companies research and develop actual vaccines. AI companies do not research and develop arms. The only argument I understand for this would be to say that an LLM is a weapon.
I donāt buy that an LLM is a weapon. Real competition exists, and certain military applications could become arms races, but AI as a whole is not one. Building out swaths of data centers to power more AI without a concrete public benefit isnāt something we should put up with.
You donāt benefit from the narrative that this is an arms race, not as an individual or a citizen. The benefactors here are the AI companies.
The technology can certainly be used as a weapon; it can hack systems already, and defend against hacks. This capability will only increase, and logically the better AI affords a strategic benefit. Hence, an arms race.
The rest of your questions arenāt questions or presuppose that AI canāt be used as a weapon.
In case it isnāt obvious, there are experts in this field that arenāt employed by AI.
The term āarms raceā has a definition and Iām pretty sure this still doesnāt apply. So in my opinion, even at best, this is political propaganda.
The US and China are in an economic race. We arenāt racing to develop a particular military capability. Nobody can even name what that capability would beā¦ āmass hacking?ā Is that it? Sounds scaryā¦ I donāt buy it. It gives me the impression of fear mongering.
If it were about AI driven military capabilities, we could have probably worked with the compute we had years ago.
I think what should be obvious is the fact that ācan be used as a weaponā doesnāt justify it being an āarm.ā The fact that they can āhackā now is largely irrelevant. Itās a nice talking point that was parroted around the AI circle jerk recently, but largely unsubstantiated. I think they all caught on to the hype Mythos was getting, so they took the narrative for another spin. But even Mythos was a load of propaganda.
How do you know it wasnāt conveniently allowed to happen, to further fuel the propaganda machine? How do you know they didnāt exaggerate or leave blank important details, particularly because theyāre financially incentivized to maintain the hype?
State actors have always hacked one another. Now with a fancy tool to do automated discovery, they might be a little faster. But that speed is also arguable, because there are reports on how AI led development actually shifts the development time burden rather than resolving it.
Those experts in the field (that arenāt employed by AI) mostly agree with this stance, from what I can tell.
I linked a paper in one of my earlier replies. Hereās another by a different author: https://tnsr.org/2021/06/debunking-the-ai-arms-race-theory/
ā¦ and, I just found a table. Hereās 7 more I guess.
I ran the report through AI (the irony is not lost on me) and while itās really very clear this is closer to a manifesto than a unbiased report (not that it claims to be unbiased), I donāt strictly disagree with any specific point.
I have several thoughts, however:
If you donāt think having a legion of skilled hackers that never sleep is a weapon, fine-- hell, even if you tighten your tinfoil hat and reject the claim that they can even do that, if the American government and the Chinese government both believe it has this capability, and they both believe itās advantage to have the better technology, then this is an arms race. Even if theyāre both wrong about the capabilities of AI or the plausibility of AGI, its still an arms race. If the it turned out that atomic bombs werenāt feasible or possible to create, that wouldnāt have made the race to build one less of an arms race, without hindsight.
If not clear, I donāt believe a conspiracy on this scale is a realistic assumption without more data than āI donāt believe itā. It would have to spread across several competing companies throughout most, if not all, of the employees.
Like I said in the first comment, Sanders can threaten all he wants, but I just donāt believe Congress is going to take a risk on āits not really that importantā and impose restrictions on AI development. (Side note that no restrictions on AI development is not the same as no restrictions on AI use or deployment.)
I think, as I said before, that we will need a global treaty on pausing development before any one country or company pauses development, or even slows it down.
Let me tighten my tinfoil hat, really quickly. First and foremost, itās great claims which require equally great evidence. The onus of evidencing (or lack thereof) ānever sleeping skilled hacking machinesā belongs to the AI companies, not me. So far itās unsubstantiated. What we really ought be discussing is the plausibility of such a machine, given what we already know.
Thatās a whole discussion in itself, which Iām happy to have. I digress, for now.
We have not met that definition, in my opinion. I donāt believe even the US government is convinced of this. In fact, Iām doubtful anyone is fully convinced.
The Manhattan Project was an arms race between the USSR and the US, which this AI race looks nothing like. We didnāt have to rely on CEOs to tell us as much, either.
I think the US and China were once in recent time more bought into the idea that the recent LLM (and more deeply, the transformer and attention) innovations might lead to more breakthroughs with military applications. Those breakthroughs have been sparse and rather not up to par, like a theoretical never-sleeping-hacking-machine would be. I certainly donāt see any grand scale race between them, militarily speaking. So noā¦ just as (if China were) foreign competition during combustion engine development, I wouldnāt consider that an āarms race.ā Especially if the largest surface area in the field was disparate competitors in the market of business to consumer goods.
Whereās the military research programs actually treating this like a priority? DARPA for AI would be something that comes to mind, not thisā¦ would this really be the best that the US has to offer in its supposed āarms race?ā
Iām arguing that most the reasons itās a race are political and economical. My issue is with the word āarms.ā I would still say it is not an arms race.
I also donāt believe in a grand conspiracy. My belief is closer to cultural stupidity having gone āoff the rails.ā
Itās propaganda, CEOs hemorrhaging cash, people buying into the propaganda, every small win gets exacerbated while loses ignored.
My position isnāt unconventional or all that unreasonable, really. Itās a growing position, per my own observations. Whatās happening isnāt right.
I still say we should worry about ourselves first. That narrative only benefits the tech CEOs. Slowing down now means we can preserve livelihood, plan better, not blow trillions more dollars, and eventually speed back up without risk of crashing.
Right now, the current trajectory causes harm in peopleās lives. I donāt buy the argument that this is acceptable without discussion, and that AI companies should get to pick that for us through their pushed narratives.
I also donāt buy that our current trajectory is optimal for arriving at some grander finish line. If you stop and readjust, you might actually ābeat Chinaā (for whatever thatās worth).
deleted by creator
What, hypothetically, would that look like?
Based on what? Theyāre certainly behaving in that manner.
This should make a global treaty relatively easy, if, as you say, no party actually believes there is a threat.
Youād expect to know about them if they existed?
Are the specific semantics important?
You do if you are claiming that the known hacks from AI companies arenāt real, and that LLMs donāt even have that capability. Consider how many people would have to be in on it to sustain that fabrication.
I mean absolutely no disrespect or insult, but an antivaxxer could say that same exact thing. They likewise do not think their stance is unconventional or unreasonable, and, to our sorrow, it is a growing position.
Yes, but thereās a subtle begging the question in this statement. If it is an arms race, āworrying about ourselvesā would be continuing on developing AI at a breakneck speed. Only if we assume your stance is correct does that sentence mean slowing down.
Without discussion, or without coming to the conclusion you want? I think thereās quite a bit of discussion.