The Manhattan Project Was Secret. Should America's AI Work Be Too?
wsj.com
wsj.com
Being the sole owner of the first AGI would probably give the US an edge against its peers, but as fair as foreign policy goes, not as much as being the only nuclear-capable country.
For the world as a whole and probably for the US itself, in absolute terms, an entirely open AGI accessible to all countries with the necessary resources could have such an impact in the global economy that everyone ends up better off in aggregate.
Remember though that the Manhattan Project was only somewhat a secret. Quoting from https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2013/03/29/narratives-of-man...
"The truth is, even without the knowledge of the spying (which they didn’t have in 1945), this narrative is somewhat false even on its own terms. There were leaks about the Manhattan Project (and atomic bombs and energy in general) printed in major press outlets in the United States and abroad. It was considered an “open secret” among Washington politicos and journalists that the Army was working on a new super-weapon that involved atomic energy just prior to its use. Now, it certainly could have been worse, but it’s not clear whether the Army (or the Office of Censorship) had much control over that."
The idea the the Manhattan Project was some sort of super-secret project with no leaks was post-war propaganda.
Remember, the Soviets had spies at the Manhattan Project, despite how one of the goals of the secrecy was to keep the Soviet Union from knowing about the project.
From the same site we can read "The worst of the Manhattan Project leaks" at https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2013/09/20/worst-manhattan-p... when John W. Raper, a columnist for the Cleveland Press, was in New Mexico on vacation, learned there was a secret project, and published what he found in the paper after he returned.
I'll present an alternative narrative for the "Sputnik moment" trope, as described by someone who lived through it.
In "Introduction of Computers in Chemical Structure Information Systems, or What Is Not Recorded in the Annals", once easily available at https://www.asis.org/History/12-lynch.pdf but now only in archive.org at https://web.archive.org/web/20130702201907/https://www.asis....
"There were great stirrings in science information at that time because of Sputnik, the challenge to the United States from the Soviet Union in October 1957. Sputnik’s beep-beep tones took the world totally by surprise. When the dust had settled, it became apparent that the Soviets had published their intentions in the open literature, but the science information system in the West was in disarray. The system had not been considered sufficiently important nor was it well enough funded to keep up with the vast increases in the numbers of scientists employed and publishing in the postwar period."
In this interpretation, the issue isn't publishing in the open, but rather who is paying attention to what's published.