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Comment by 101011 | Hacker News Reader

TY for sharing. I found this to be very enlightening, especially when reading more about the board members that were part of the oust.

One of the board of directors that fired him co-signed these AI principles (https://futureoflife.org/open-letter/ai-principles/) that are very much in line with safeguarding general intelligence

Another of them wrote this article (https://www.foreignaffairs.com/china/illusion-chinas-ai-prow...) in June of this year that opens by quoting Sam Altman saying US regulation will "slow down American industry in such a way that China or somebody else makes faster progress” and basically debunks that stance...and quite well, I might add.

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So the argument against AI regulations crippling R&D is that China is currently far behind and also faces their own weird gov pressures? That's a big gamble, applying very-long term regulations (as they always are long term) to a short term window betting on predictions of a non-technical board member.

There's far more to the world than China on top of that and importantly developments happen both inside and outside of the scope of regulatory oversight (usually only heavily commercialized products face scrutiny) and China itself will eventually catch up to the average - progress is rarely a non-stop hockey stick, it plateaus. LLMs might already be hitting a wall https://twitter.com/HamelHusain/status/1725655686913392933)

The Chinese are experts at copying and stealing Western tech. They don't have to be on the frontier to catch up to a crippled US and then continue development at a faster pace, and as we've seen repeatedly in history regulations stick around for decades after their utility has long past. They are not levers that go up and down, they go in one direction and maybe after many many years of damage they might be adjusted, but usually after 10 starts/stops and half-baked non-solutions papered on as real solutions - if at all.

> The Chinese are experts at copying and stealing Western tech.

Sure that's been their modus operandi in the past, but to hold an opinion that a billion humans on the other side of the Pacific are only capable of copying and no innovation of their own is a rather strange generalization for a thread on general intelligence.

Well, I guess (hope) no one thinks it is due to genetic disabilities which are preventing disrupting innovations from (mainland) chinese.

It is rather a cultural/political thing. Free thinking and stepping out of line is very dangerous in a authorian society. Copying approved tech on the other hand is safe.

And this culture has not changed in china lately, rather the opposite. Look what happened to the Alibaba founder, or why there is no more Winnie Puuh in china.

This seems to make more sense. Perhaps it has to do with OpenAI is not "open" anymore. Not supporting and getting rid of the OpenAI Gym was certainly a big change in direction of the company.

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