Hacker News Reader

Comment by okdood64 | Hacker News Reader

Something I see lacking in many discussions about AI Safety and Alignment is:

What does the role of China mean for AI Safety? Is there any reason to believe that they will a) adopt any standards SV, the US or some international government body will create, or b) care enough to slow down development of AI?

If AI Safety is really a concern, you can expect in the long run (not that much further behind than the US) China will catch up to the point of where they have some AI technology that is dangerous enough, and it will be up to them (their government and their tech companies) to decide what to do.

View on HN

My feeling is that China will not adopt anything, inside their country, that can jeopardize the speed of their AI development progress. I suspect that China will also support and promote corresponding regulations in the Western countries, thinking that it will slow down the progress. I maybe wrong but I think official policy documents say that China is strategic rival number one, or something to that effect. I suspect China will act accordingly.

The opposite could also be argued. Most AI safety training today is to ensure compliance with various forms of ethics and ideologies. This is known to reduce general intelligence, but some companies feel the cost is worth it and others do not (e.g. Mistral, Grok AI).

China is not exactly an ideology free society. The list of things you cannot say in China without angering the government is very large. This is especially difficult for an AI training company to handle because so much of the rules are implied and unstated, based on reading the tea leaves of the latest speeches by officials. Naively, you would expect a Chinese chatbot to be very heavily RLHF conditioned and to require continuous ongoing retraining to avoid saying anything that contradicts the state ideology.

Such efforts may also face difficulties getting enough training material. IIRC getting permission to crawl the English-speaking internet is very difficult in China, and if you don't have special access then you just won't be able to get reliable bandwidth across the border routers.

If AI is anything like what the western optimists want it to be, China will absolutely forbid it.

Free information, individual access to immense technological power, material abundance, etc.

All threats to CCP.

Indeed. I'm concerned about the safety of future AGI systems, but China is why I wouldn't advocate for a unilateral pause or slowdown.

This is why I can't take the Safetyists seriously. Yudkowsky's essay in Time demanding a global pause in AI research is so naive to the point of parody.

And who is going to enforce this "pause", Eliezer? What he's really advocating is global war to prevent the AI apocalypse. Fair enough, but he should really make that his argument because AI research doesn't stop with out it.

Contrary to popular HN belief, the human species has curtailed technological development along various lines, internationally.

E.g. Human cloning, human hybrids, hugely successful non-proliferation in nuclear weapons

True, but those are all pretty different from AI, though.

It’s not immediately obvious that human cloning has great benefits. Ditto human hybrids (supposing that’s even possible). And nuclear weapons proliferation is pretty difficult to hide because of how they’re made.

But prove your data center isn’t running AI models.

China is the boogeyman. Any reason to believe NSA/FBI or UK/India or anyone who will follow the limits. If singularity is end of world, anyone at 99.999% singularity will rule the world, so it is naive that academic or political efforts are stopping anyone.

The China argument is mainly used for consolidating the fud around ai. I doubt the chinese lose any sleep over this.

Personally I trust China with it more than I trust SV and their handlers in the CIA. But that's just me.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com