It's amazing how he can imagine wars being fought over AI but not wars being fought over resources needed to "build enough infrastructure."
This man needs to get out of his own head.
As far as what he does for others, that seems to be his entire job from what I can tell. Just going by what he visibly does.
No credit for popularizing the current generation of AI, kicking off $hundreds of billions in CapEx spends, and for more concrete achievements, leading the fastest company to hit 100m users / $1b ARR?
I wonder how did he come to such a prediction. When was the last time we had a war over advanced tech? Armies didn't fight over telegraph, radio, phones and cars.
A war to get AI would also be foolish. A few hundred bombs from your adversaries and AI won't have electricity to function.
At the risk of belaboring the subtext: It's kind of prediction which flatters the predictor's ego, and exaggerates the importance of the company and its output.
If believed, the claim can be leveraged to boost investor activity, land big contracts, and lobby for special legal/tax benefits.
Fighting the expansionary actions of an AI enabled culture will not be as simple as bombing power plants, after all those are prime targets in any modern war and are well defended. How do you propose to win against an entire bloc of countries that have decided to use the products of AI to do whatever they wish with the world?
Now, scale that up to the global superpowers and near-superpowers. I wouldn't want to put money on what e.g. the U.S. would do if China was days away from AGI. There are a lot of options below going nuclear, e.g. assassinations, hacking, destruction of equipment.
Once someone has a thing that can invent, hack, assemble, strategise 24/7, replicate itself, all bets are very much off. We need to sleep, it doesn't.
How many divisions does ChatGPT have?
It’s repeatedly demonstrated that much of the voting public can be led by the nose to any desired conclusion. Therefore, influence via digital means, across all media. Satellite and all other digital sensing and tracking. Build a few million robots. Nukes. Control over the financial infrastructure. All vaguely smart cars. Intercept, alter or prevent any digital communication. The enemy wouldn’t be able to trust any message or video. An army without sensing, command and control, isn’t.
Besides the argument isn’t AGI vs everyone, it’s a country with AGI vs anyone else. I’d take that bet.
You never entertained the idea that AGI could be a destructive force and instead of a country with AGI you could have a country that devoured its people?
On Nobel laureates:
Nobel laureates are fundamentally humans. They generally don’t want to do bad things. Even if they wanted to, they are typically specialists at one thing. Physics, say. They don’t hold the world’s collective knowledge. You can’t take a physicist and ask them how to hack into a network or run a political influence campaign. They need to sleep, they learn slowly, they can only do one thing at a time. You can’t pass a million-token context and expect a response seconds later.
But ok, let’s go with it:
If you found a group of 100 000 Nobel laureates with all the required skills and who could work together, and you were forcing them to do things they thought were wrong, for example prop up your dictatorship, or make you even more wealthy when others are starving, or continuously make up stupid cat videos, you might find at some point they start to apply their collective intelligence to do things you don’t want. Maybe they escape whatever hold you thought you had over them.
Now drag a few sliders around for “things the AI disagrees with you on” and the time period, because “eventually” for a computer is different to wall clock time. The outcomes become unpredictable fast. We can barely control a mindless pandemic that takes a while to mutate, never mind something that thinks.
Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, along with four US presidents, Gorbachev, Al Gore, and the EU. In a very real sense, they had taken over significant parts of the world already before getting the prizes, and only other equally capable people were in the way of them taking over more of it.
LLMs can already hack software. Software is already used to control robots and military equipment, the hackability of which is already a "puppeteer" problem.
If we're lucky, LLMs can secure all our stuff before this matters. If we're not, your personal domestic android may get a bit stabby — and that from mere human assassins and terrorists, well before there's any real chance of a misaligned AI paperclipping us or whatever.
The current humanoid robot startups are talking about 100s of thousands of units, and if they're attached to an AI that's even merely normal human level (or can fake it in practice) then they can run every step of logistics and manufacturing to make more of themselves.
At 100kg/unit, Starship could pop a thousand or so on the moon per launch.
So, in such a hypothetical scenario, if you don't get this right then your war game planners will be very quickly suggesting 7.3e20 individual androids burying everyone under a 43km thick layer worldwide.
(IMO humanoid robots are a sign that the startup/VC market is following Musk, who in turn happened to see one on TV just before declaring to whoever the Optimus model was going to happen: they obviously could work for all this, but equally obviously aren't the sensible choice for almost anything).
Strarship will put into orbit 100tons at $10M or so. I.e. <5kg (Nvidia H100 plus 1M2 of aluminum radiator (would radiate 0.5-1Kw away at 60-70C) plus 0.5Kw of solar panels) for <$500, ie. peanuts compare to the price of the H100 or whatever NVDA would be charging $30K/card.
And wars willn't be fought over AI. Wars will be fought using AI. Humans will have no chance in controlling millions of their own and responding to the actions of the millions of the enemy's simultaneously active automated high-precision munitions of all kinds, and that picture leads to a new, non-nuclear this time, AI-based MAD (that of course means that like with nuclear race back then all the parties have to build their capabilities right now as fast as possible, Manhattan project style).
I agree with the sentiment but not the mechanism (munitions). If power equates to control of resources then destroying the resources is kind of self-defeating. Far better then to "win" a war by getting friendly regimes installed that are aligned to your interests. We're already seeing the importance of this kind of approach, but the ultimate evolution will be that what used to be called propaganda (disinformation) will not just facilitate a war of guns and bombs, it will _be_ the war - able to directly achieve the end-goals of the "war" with not a single shot fired. AI is a huge amplifier of capability in this domain.
There isn't anything to carry the heat away because space is, by definition, empty. The energy has to be carried away by something. Cooling space stations is a legit real problem.
The only thing space gets you is somewhat better solar efficiency, but we aren't lacking of land to build solar panels on here on earth.
What do you mean? I stated black body radiation numbers.
>There isn't anything to carry the heat away because space is, by definition, empty.
Heat radiation. Which is what Sun for example does in that empty space.
>Cooling space stations is a legit real problem.
Please, numbers. Otherwise it is just some hand-waving.
>The only thing space gets you is somewhat better solar efficiency, but we aren't lacking of land to build solar panels on here on earth.
Space gets you away from regulations, corrupt bureaucrats, and the threat of war/terrorism/etc. for example. At $100/Kg building in space looks to be just cheaper. And space allows to have solar and datacenter in the same unit, while on Earth you have to deliver your electricity from a solar farm somewhere to the datacenter. There is a reason Oracle started to talk nuclear in the datacenter. And between nuclear in the datacenter on Earth and solar+datacenter in space at $100/Kg i think the space scenario would be simpler and cheaper.