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Everyone should slow down AI development except for me

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Re: Everyone should slow down AI development except for me

#441

Post by gpt5 »

mepiethree wrote: post #214
gpt5 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are right, US can do nothing on AI. After all, it doesn't have the shipbuilding capacity or even beat sandal-wearing islamists.

Shipbuilding is but one proxy for China’s dominance in industrialization. A more relevant one for AI is: China has built more energy capacity in the last 4 years than the USA has built in the last 150. AI is increasingly limited by power. For this and other reasons, IMO the US will inevitably be surpassed on AI. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-28/china-s-f...

Last I've seen, it was compute and not solar panels that is limiting AI. And the US share of worldwide compute capacity has increased from 40% to 70% over the last 4 years, while China has shrinked to just 15% from 35% over that period.

https://epoch.ai/data-insights/ai-supercomputers-performance...

Re: Everyone should slow down AI development except for me

#442

Post by paulddraper »

ianm218 wrote: post #383
Oarch wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GPT-2 was called "too dangerous to release".

Is there a sense where they were right because GPT-2 directly led to the current situation where you can atleast objectively say that reasonable people are pretty worried about existential risks of AI .

By that logic, farming is too dangerous to release.

Re: Everyone should slow down AI development except for me

#443

Post by reverius42 »

Epa095 wrote: post #192
nradov wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope. Even if China agrees they'll hide their real activities. You're so naive.

If the Chinese loves their children too.

Everyone loves their children. Not everyone believes p(doom) is higher for AI than for other things we already use like nuclear power, or for that matter, fossil fuels.

Re: Everyone should slow down AI development except for me

#444

Post by howunfortunate »

i5heu wrote: post #336
howunfortunate wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no logical error here if the end is actually near. So it all hinges on an empirical disagreement you have with them. There's nothing particularly unserious about that.

This is the theological discussion if god exists all and how we should act over again.

Do you mean Pascal's wager? Yes, that's a very appropriate and useful comparison here.

Re: Everyone should slow down AI development except for me

#445

Post by ElProlactin »

gpt5 wrote: post #441
mepiethree wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shipbuilding is but one proxy for China’s dominance in industrialization. A more relevant one for AI is: China has built more energy capacity in the last 4 years than the USA has built in the last 150. AI is increasingly limited by power. For this and other reasons, IMO the US will inevitably be surpassed on AI. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-28/china-s-f...

Last I've seen, it was compute and not solar panels that is limiting AI. And the US share of worldwide compute capacity has increased from 40% to 70% over the last 4 years, while China has shrinked to just 15% from 35% over that period. https://epoch.ai/data-insights/ai-supercomputers-performance...

The data covers just ~10–20% of global aggregate AI supercomputer performance as of March 2025.

And then there's this: https://epoch.ai/data/gpu-clusters-documentation/coverage

> The coverage of Chinese companies is particularly poor. Our average coverage of 8 major companies is 15%.

The bigger issue is that if you're interested in frontier training, the national aggregate doesn't tell you much. The question is whether your top labs can get to the chip scale necessary to train a frontier model and China's labs have already demonstrated they can. See https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/deepseek-debates

But it's not even clear that training frontier models is where the real innovation occurs. When it comes to fine-tuning, deploying, and building AI-based products, inference is the name of the game and the chip quality is less important. Huawei's Ascend is already pretty competitive here and then you're also discounting China's open-weight access to good models, a huge base of engineering talent and a massive domestic market to iterate against.

And unless Anthropic, OpenAI et. al. are willing to invest billions of dollars training models that will only be used by a small number of clients (like the government), there's no way to fight distillation. Protecting any model from distillation means forgoing its full revenue potential, improvement via feedback and all the benefits AI is supposed to bring to the broad US economy. And if you restrict your most advanced models, you just push people to Chinese open-weight models, which is what we're already seeing.

Re: Everyone should slow down AI development except for me

#446

Post by protocolture »

metalcrow wrote: post #154
protocolture wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Giving the big boys a regulatory moat isnt going to do anything positive for the space.

I don't think giving them free reign is going to do anything positive for it either.

But which outcome is more likely with the US government?

Re: Everyone should slow down AI development except for me

#447

Post by ElProlactin »

swat535 wrote: post #358
gpt5 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are right, US can do nothing on AI. After all, it doesn't have the shipbuilding capacity or even beat sandal-wearing islamists.

The "sandal-wearing islamists." as you refer them to here, invented Algebra and the postal relay system. The best part of your comment is that US couldn't even defeat the Houthis, who literally wear sandals in the desert.

I think the point of my comment went straight over your head, but just to be clear: the Houthis did not invent algebra.

Re: Everyone should slow down AI development except for me

#448

Post by danny_codes »

utilize1808 wrote: post #333

I feel it's more about keeping US's massive investment on AI afloat. Added compliance will allow US to further sanction non-US models (i.e. the Chinese ones) as they can just label them non-compliant.

Ofc. This announcement is in all likelihood a calculated pr play to create some regulatory moat, because internal progress is likely stalling out

Re: Everyone should slow down AI development except for me

#449

Post by rtpg »

int_19h wrote: post #280
anon373839 wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is costly, especially right now. I don’t think you can make a case for it on cost savings! The throughput in a single stream is about 50 tokens/sec (a bit less for prose, a bit more for code due to speculative draft acceptance rates) and about 2,000 tokens/sec for prefill. Both numbers are flat and stable as context accumulates. That’s what finally tilted me away from the Mac Studio despite its much superior memor…

I don't think you can ever make a case for it on cost savings in general. Inference is very obviously the kind of problem where things are cheaper at scale, and this is still true for smaller models. The only reason to run locally is privacy.

Right now the "subsidies" etc I think make the calculus really tough, but for general compute.... for example running CI just on a Mac Mini can get you real cost effective throughput compared to running CI on GH runners and whatnot.

Things get cheaper at scale but that's where the provider's margins come in!

I do think there's also an interesting idea: you buy a box like this and run it at a fixed-ish cost (well, electricity). Your demand goes up but your supply is fixed... and that back pressure means that you still have good cost control.

With cloud providers it's a _biiiiit_ too easy to just increase spend.

Sometimes it's OK for things to just be slow.

Re: Everyone should slow down AI development except for me

#450

Post by anon373839 »

int_19h wrote: post #438
anon373839 wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Privacy is a great reason, but independence is another. It’s very nice knowing that you’re going to get the same reliable product every time you call the model. Nothing is going to change unless you decide to change it.

That is not a counterargument to cloud inference though. You can also run open weight models in the cloud, and it's still cheaper. So privacy really is the only motivation to run on local hardware.

Ah, no, that’s not cheaper. Renting GPUs adds up quickly and leaves you with nothing in the end.

Renting tokens from open model providers is cheaper but it incurs the same issues: unexpected changes in model quality, inconsistent speeds, service outages.

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