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The US is winning the AI race where it matters most: commercialization

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Re: The US is winning the AI race where it matters most: commercialization

#661

Post by [deleted] »

bdavisx wrote: post #656
saltyoldman wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the time the war on drugs looked unwinnable. Which is why the joke about the war on drugs was that it was always a losing war. And then at some point in 2000s we ended the war on drugs. In hindsight, I would definitely declare today that we WERE winning it when we were fighting it. Now that we don't, we're getting massacred.

>In hindsight, I would definitely declare today that we WERE winning it when we were fighting it. Now that we don't, we're getting massacred. LOL, no, we've never even been in a winning position. Were we winning when the CIA used cocaine to finance weapons for Iran? I guess we were winning when we put a lot of black people in jail for decades for possessing crack while white wall street folks were getting slaps on th…

[deleted]

Re: The US is winning the AI race where it matters most: commercialization

#662

Post by newaccount670 »

arthurofbabylon wrote: post #474

How does gobbledygook like this get traction on HN? What has happened on HN culturally to allow something like this to surface to the top?

This is a website where anybody can trivially create multiple accounts in minutes. It has minimal protections against abuse. The strength of the community relies entirely on its obscurity and it's no longer obscure.

It died as a home for intellectuals the moment it became big enough to be a viable platform for political propaganda (many years ago).

Re: The US is winning the AI race where it matters most: commercialization

#663

Post by mrsilencedogood »

baq wrote: post #548
GolfPopper wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the main question for me is, why is this a war? It's a war because the hinted promise behind the hype that the first organization to reach some as-yet-entirely-theoretical AGI that can bootstrap itself to godlike capabilities will then Install Planetary Overlord* and rule the world as near-deities themselves, with the rest of the (surviving) human race as their slaves. I think it's a nonsensical idea, but that's th…

> I think it's a nonsensical idea, but that's the relevant driver. Nice to hear from an optimist sometimes, but it’s hard to be one when meat compute substrate can do all those amazing things in a 4U package on 20W and you extrapolate to silicon

I don't think we understand consciousness, thought, and what we generally consider to be "intelligence" even nearly well enough that we can start getting hopeful that what works for us is going to work for a computer. Philosophers have been working on this for literally millennia and despite electron microscopy, MRIs, our entire standard model of physics, etc etc etc... we're basically no closer than the ancient Greeks, despite continuous opining on the topic.

Luckily for planetary overlord hopefuls, you probably don't need the whole package to become overlord. Just machines that can build machines.

I will remark that I don't really understand why any of the current idiot overlord hopefuls even want the job. The entire world is _already_ functionally their slaves. The only thing jeff bezos doesn't have that I can imagine he wants is the world to not think he's an asshole. But short of complete genocide of the human race, I don't think even overlord status will make progress on that. Might even be counterproductive.

Re: The US is winning the AI race where it matters most: commercialization

#664

Post by thenthenthen »

yalogin wrote: post #30

Anthropic, OpenAI and Google are the standouts, but the main question for me is, why is this a war? In their own context China has greatly benefitted from this. They shored up their gpu design and manufacturing expertise. If this really is a war, trump is kneecapping the country with his lawlessness and eroding America’s good will. If the world cannot trust China with their data and they cannot trust the U.S. to prov…

There is active information exchange between US and China (and EU), for example: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1989/06/25/i...

This is an article from 1989, but I deem it relevant in what has been discussed during Trumps current visit to China and not only that, but offers some bigger picture views.

Re: The US is winning the AI race where it matters most: commercialization

#665

Post by ZeroGravitas »

leonidasrup wrote: post #659
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #655

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What an embarrassingly ill-informed thing to say. But when the guy wrote a book in 2023 about the fall of China, he kind of has to say that doesn't he, even as he lives through the fall of the USA. He's called out in the sub-head as an "expert" but what is he an expert in? Renewables? Energy policy? No, he's an expert in saying that China is too state-led. Why would an expert in that want to downplay their success, a…

" For Beijing to achieve those goals, Climate Action Tracker says China needs "clear targets for coal consumption reduction" in its new 5YP. However, the economic roadmap released in March was not "explicit about how fossil fuels will be constrained," said China analyst Qi Qin of the Finland-based Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air. Though Chinese President Xi Jinping promised in 2021 to detail a reduction i…

Same person being quoted in the same article:

> New Chinese government guidelines on fossil fuels released on April 22 support the view that the country is willing to move away from finite fossil fuels, strengthen energy independence and still achieve its climate targets, says Qin.

> "The new central guideline talks about strictly controlling fossil fuel consumption, reducing coal and controlling oil. It still leaves room for flexibility, but these are concrete policy levers," Qin said of the document, which also indicated a desire to increase clean energy consumption.

Elsewhere Climate Action Tracker on the USA:

> The Trump Administration is pursuing an executive and legislative agenda to systematically repeal targets, policies, and funding for climate change mitigation and science. The administration is actively obstructing the buildout of renewable energy, while encouraging the production and consumption of fossil fuels, completely reversing the Biden Administration’s course on climate action. This is the most aggressive, comprehensive, and consequential climate policy rollback that the Climate Action Tracker has ever analysed.

They have a worse score than China:

https://climateactiontracker.org/countries/china/

https://climateactiontracker.org/countries/usa/

All of which, even the bits quoted to claim "no transition is happening", support my original contention that all the things mentioned in the cartoon were being strongly pushed by China in 2009. They have only gained momentum since and they've profited from doing so.

Re: The US is winning the AI race where it matters most: commercialization

#666

Post by aaarrm »

throwawayqqq11 wrote: post #525
GolfPopper wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the main question for me is, why is this a war? It's a war because the hinted promise behind the hype that the first organization to reach some as-yet-entirely-theoretical AGI that can bootstrap itself to godlike capabilities will then Install Planetary Overlord* and rule the world as near-deities themselves, with the rest of the (surviving) human race as their slaves. I think it's a nonsensical idea, but that's th…

I will never comprehend why a godlike deity wouldnt just skip all the wetware bs with us humans and conquer some other celestial body to make paperclips.

Well it could recognize that wetware is extremely energy and storage efficient in some ways.

Re: The US is winning the AI race where it matters most: commercialization

#667

Post by RetroTechie »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #317
Jalad wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But if someone invents super intelligence, they can dominate new AI research, control global economies, fight much better, and all very quickly. After reading "If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies" I think this is not the correct take. If anyone creates ASI, it just means it's going to wipe everyone out, and it doesn't matter if China or the US do it first

If you were an American, wouldn't you prefer the US wiped you out rather than China?

Lol... counterpoint:

If it's gonna be humanity's last act, should not all nations work together? To make our collective wipeout as grand and spectacular as possible?

Re: The US is winning the AI race where it matters most: commercialization

#668

Post by jurgenburgen »

Ajedi32 wrote: post #660
GolfPopper wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the main question for me is, why is this a war? It's a war because the hinted promise behind the hype that the first organization to reach some as-yet-entirely-theoretical AGI that can bootstrap itself to godlike capabilities will then Install Planetary Overlord* and rule the world as near-deities themselves, with the rest of the (surviving) human race as their slaves. I think it's a nonsensical idea, but that's th…

It doesn't have to be that extreme. Even if rather than "godlike capabilities" it just boosted your economic efficiency by 2x over other nations that would still be a serious geopolitical threat. (I'm not necessarily saying that's a realistic outcome either, but it's certainly more realistic.)

If your enemy has a theoretical non-zero chance of achieving infinite power, does it justify expending near-infinite resources to get there first?

I guess we’ll find out.

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