Good thing is that it's going to take at least a few months to a few decades depending on how hard AI execs want to raise funding.
(Or the setup to a Greek tragedy !)
The deeper issue here is treating it as a zero sum game means there's a winner and a loser, and we're investing trillions of dollars into making the "opponent" more powerful than us.
I think that's pretty stupid, and we should aim for symbiosis instead. I think that's the only good outcome. We already have it, sorta-kinda.
Speaking of oddly apt biology metaphors: the way you stop a pathogen from colonizing a substrate is by having a healthy ecosystem of competitors already in place. That has pretty interesting implications for the "rogue AI eats internet" scenario.
There needs to be something already there to stop it.
So, back way before ChatGPT era, the folks over at AI safety/X-risk think sphere worked out a pretty compelling argument that two AGIs never need to fight, because they are transparent to each other (can read each other's goal functions off the source code), so they can perfectly predict each other's behavior in what-if scenarios, which means they can't lie to each other. This means each can independently arrive at the same mathematically optimal solution to a conflict, which AFAIR most likely involves just merging into a single AI with a blended goal set, representing each of the competing AIs original values in proportion to their relative strength. Both AIs, the argument goes, can work this out with math, so they'll arrive straight at the peace treaty without exchanging a single shot. In such case, your plan just doesn't work.
But that goes out of the windows if the AIs are both opaque bags of floats, uncomprehensible to themselves or each other. That means they'll never be able to make hard assertions about their values and behaviors, so they can't trust each other, so they'll have to fight it out. In such scenario, your idea might just work.
Who knew that brute-forcing our way into AGI instead of taking more engineered approach is what offers us out one chance at saving ourselves by stalemating God before it's born.
(I also never realized that interpretability might reduce safety.)
See "The Forbin Project": https://vimeo.com/584593423
And even if you did, wouldn't you need infinite computation to simulate every permutation of the neural net? (Your own, and the enemy's?)
Also the whole thing implies a superintelligence would be perfectly rational, which is a pretty funny assumption. Relative to animals we are already superintelligent. How's that super-rationality going for us? xD
A better frame here is replicators, I think. The thing that spreads doesn't have to be rational, or better quality or whatever. It just has to be better at spreading.
That ends up looking less like Betamax, more like VHS, or less like Lisp and more like... JavaScript. Whatever the AGI equivalent of JavaScript would look like.
In my honest opinion also, AGI isn't even possible. But if the theoretical version of what people think AGI will be ever comes to be, it is not good news for humans if we look at it from a logical hypothetical scenario.
But naturally, humans will always be weak compared to a hyperintelligent distributed intelligence since we only have a limited amount of intelligence and are bound by biological factors.
In the current LLM world, ofc there's no risk of a chatbot taking over the world other than the technology being misused by humans for scams or phishing, etc.