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Comment by Analemma_ | Hacker News Reader

It's the "If we don't, someone else will" effect. So long as there are competitive markets and competition between nation-states, a single player cannot unilaterally defect from the race, no matter how dangerous it is. Half the comments on HN lately are "wtf Claude is so dumb compared to Codex; I'm switching"-- nobody can slow down while those exist.

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We, globally, can stop it. It has worked (so far) for nuclear disarmament, and could work for training large models. I know that policing the usage of computer clusters is not a popular opinion in technical forums, but something has to be done.

Specially when talking about potential superintelligences. And if people think that's impossible, remember that current models would have been considered science fiction just a few years ago.

It hasn't worked for nuclear disarmament. We live in a world where many countries have nuclear arsenals. "But it hasn't killed us yet!" Yeah sure, it's only been less than a century since they were invented. Who knows when nuclear war will come?

True, but look at nuclear tests. There used to be around 50 tests every year, for decades. Now the only nuclear tests in the last 27 years were the six done by North Korea[1]. And there's still only nine countries with any nuclear weapons, and none in the past twenty years[2].

That's a bit better than just "it hasn't killed us yet". I think it shows we can at least stop the further development of this kind of technology.

[1] https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/nuclear-testing-tally

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_with_nuclear_we...

To the extent nuclear arms control works, I think it's only because nuclear weapons are so hard to build-- uranium enrichment is hugely expensive and complicated, and plutonium weapons need actual reactors.

If it was possible for ordinary companies to build nuclear weapons, and also release open-source ones that anyone could use to compete with the paid ones, I suspect we'd all have been dead a long time ago, arms control treaties or no.

Even the (SOTA LLM) open source models are trained with huge clusters. Datacenters are also hugely expensive and complicated.

Or you can take one step back and look at chip allocation. As far as I know there are only three companies on the planet that can make the chips that go in those clusters. One (ASML), if you look back the supply chain to the Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography Systems.

If politicians decided that no more large language models should be trained, it sounds like we could do it.

Nuclear tests are extremely easy to detect worldwide, and enrichment activity is a major industrial process that is also fairly easy to track given the specialized equipment needed.

AI development doesn’t have any of these characteristics. It would be almost impossible to easily distinguish a datacenter that is working on AI development and a datacenter mining cryptocurrency.

It would not be nearly as easy to stop AI development as it is to stop nuclear arms development.

There's also little reason to keep iterating on nukes. What we have now more than serves its purpose. With AI/LLM there's always going to be a push to one up everyone else.

North Korea is such a based country tbh

I don't buy the superintelligence package, but I think uncritical LLM adoption poses plenty of threats to things I care about, in a mundane human-scale way.

Anyhow, I think you're (absolutely! ugh) right about the politics and I try to make the same point to people: whether you love or hate LLMs, accepting the "inevitabilism" framing is just ceding control of the Overton window. For better or worse, technology adoption can be and has been slowed by politics. We don't have nuclear plants everywhere. We don't have Project Orion starships colonizing Mars. We still have very strong social stigmas against genetic selection for human embryos, etc. This all can change in a heartbeat, and I'm not sure that policing the hardware rather than holding specific humans accountable for bad LLM outcomes is productive, but fundamentally: yes, we can stop it.

> I don't buy the superintelligence package

It's the same deal as Quantum Computers breaking crypto. Maybe there's an 80% chance of it never happening, but when you multiply that remaining 20% by the potential impact...

are you going to nuke China when they predictably ignore you? what the fuck are you going to do, tariff them? lol.

I think the standard answer is "yes, the consequence of noncompliance is bombing the datacenters, but it wouldn't happen because China also understands why we shouldn't build it".

the standard answer is laughably naive, then.

"might is right" has never been more true than now.

I am not sure where you get the idea that ANY country thinks we shouldn’t build AI.

In 2023 there was an open letter titled "Pause Giant AI Experiments", signed by almost all the big names on the West. I'd say the public opinion only got worse since then.

Clearly state "we could both verifiably slow down, which you might want to do given that we're ahead & have way more compute. If you don't agree (or defect later), we'll just immediately resume and win"

Ideally also persuade them there are risks and it's worth everyone slowing down for them, and apply pressure in other ways, but not sure that's even necessary.

with nukes you can regulate the inputs because its physically impossible to build one without uranium or some other fissile material. they also give off radiation making it easier to detect. its hard to make them in secret when you need mines, big enrichment facilities and years of research with hundreds of engineers where just one of them can leak the whole thing.

training llms only takes compute and memory. two things that are basically everywhere. even if you somehow stopped making new gpus today theres still millions of them out there and its possible to start a secret production line. you can maybe try some controls at the tooling and chemical level but look what happened with asml and huawei.

the only thing you can really do is find and stop large data centers that are built out in public. nothing outside of political pressure works against secret operations in a fortified bunker or any form of distributed training. if a "rogue state" like north korea decides to make skynet they will eventually get it as long as their engineers know what there doing.

and the best way to fight bad X {ai, tech, religion, politics} has always been good X, not no X. in this case thats open source models, coming out of china or europe or anywhere else. thats the real answer.

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