Because from the outside, their behavior looks like a situation of "What if Microsoft/Apple put controls in place to make it impossible to develop an operating system using their OS?"
Unlike nuclear weapons, advancing in this arms race requires actually deploying the product over and over again. Deploying the product makes your advancements visible to your competitors.
It makes complete sense to try to limit the degree to which that's true.
The nuclear 'race' was based on the premise that the winner could use it to destroy all other racers (a faulty assumption, see the USSR among others). I will charitably assume Anthropic does not intend to literally destroy anyone and merely wants to become an AGI monopoly. But if AGI is so powerful, any monopoly would not be stable since the incentives for entry into the market are massive. Why would China stop developing AGI just because Anthropic has it?
or is it more similar to the Cold War, where there were obviously competitors engaged in the race?
And yes, agreed the equilibrium dynamics for AGI are very different (and far harder to predict) than nukes. That sounds like a good reason to be sure we get there first since presumably any potential advantage wouldn't go to the second or third runner-ups
"Ability to literally destroy the other entity" is not a necessary or even typical feature of arms races.
It seems that the frontier labs believe they're participants in a winner-take-all market. Therefore they're in "an arms race."
Winner-take-all markets do not require that the winner literally destroys the losers, but only that the winner enjoys disproportionate returns compared to their actual superiority.
Whether or not this is actually true is TBD, but I think you're naive to think the frontier labs do not believe this to be true.
As far as naivete, wouldn't it be more naive to take their EA claims at face value, rather than the more realistic assumption that they like money?
You're pretty explicitly saying that dominating the competition is not the type of "destruction" necessary to qualify as an arms race.
> As far as naivete, wouldn't it be more naive to take their EA claims at face value, rather than the more realistic assumption that they like money?
Huh? Greed is – quite obviously – the major driving force behind the arms race. That is not a mitigation whatsoever.
> Whether or not this is actually true is TBD, but I think you're naive to think the frontier labs do not believe this to be true.
P.S.: On reflection, it's even worse than that, because it'd trigger based on anything the user types or reads on any site. Someone mentions a "critical rendering path" and now you can't participate on that thread in the Blender forums.
Let's just assume it was "only" that?
It's unreasonable to assume they are aiming to upset people who are just giving them money in the way they want. It makes no business sense, for any company. So that has to be a byproduct.
Model training is one of the more expensive undertakings in the world right now and distilling models from competitors against the TOS is apparently something that is going on for very little money. Why would they not "just" try to take measures against that?
All they had to do was have a simple, transparent output "Sorry, that request is against our terms of service. This session has been terminated"
The vast majority of frontier research is about how to build better models, not about alignment.
All this longtermism though is harmful. There are real problems of data theft, bias, labor displacement, and environmental costs that are happening right now but every push for regulation and regulatory capture, and all the safety talk, is always focused on some speculative future machine god to distract from the current problems.
I'd have a higher opinion of these labs if the issues they openly talked about and worked toward where the real issues we face currently, not speculative defenses against some future AGI that may never happen in my lifetime. I'm less worried about "our new model might kill all humans in the future" and more worried about how we are going to address anti-competitive behavior, copyright protections, labor rights, and the energy impact.
Honestly, that respect for 'copyright protections' has somehow become a leftist shibboleth is bizarre to me and indicative that something has become deeply warped in our discussions around this topic.
Outside of that though, there are other issues right now that need addressed before we speculate about what might be possible with ASI in the future. If the potential for a harmful ASI is truly that near, and that great, then why push forward at all? Where's the push for a global stop order on development of this technology until regulation can catch up?
The talk of a potential future serves as a distraction from the very real problems people are facing in their lives today.
While Dario and team are worrying about ASI, real people are worrying about how they are going to continue to feed their family after wide spread layoffs set a very large portion of the population back into a lower quality lifestyle. Real people are concerned about water usage is draught stricken areas, the massive energy demand driving grid instability in their communities, or that the environmental and economic externalities of model training is being socialized while the profits continue to be strictly private.
What about the mass proliferation of misinformation at scale having a real effect on our democratic process?
Forgive me if I'd like to see those addressed first, and fast, before we start worrying about an unpromised future technology.
That being said, I can't help but experience a bit of Deja Vu over arguments like those around biorisk. I've seen the same exact things said in the early 2000s over widespread access to broadband and Google. When the anarchist cookbook spread around online and everyone was super paranoid about democratized terrorism, and we had big regulatory pushes for ISP level censorship and user tracking. Telecoms frequently argued that only they can keep the web safe, with strict and expensive regulations that naturally only those large heavily capitalized companies can afford to go through. Like the early internet and search, its just another way to lower the latency required for a human to find already existing public data
Well, very little of that played out. Turns out the math, for now, is the same, and information retrieval doesn't directly correlate to democratized weaponization. In 2001, a bad actor still needed a physical lab, precursor chemicals, etc to build a physical threat. Those same exact physical constraints exist today. The software cannot yet cross the digital-to-physical divide.
Keep an eye on the risk, by all means, but I don't see it yet as justification to cement a monopoly or oligopoly, nor do I see it as a reason to prioritize a risk of information availability over the climate and environmental risks that are far more likely to end the species.
If you have a sizeable bucket of money, it's so, so easy to get folks so distracted by (or invested in) movie plot threats that they totally fail to (or have a "plausible" excuse to fail to) notice the actual, lasting harm that you're doing to society at scales both small and large.
If Anthropic had pushed hard and nonstop since their founding to ensure that all LLM companies in the world were legally bound to stop all LLM development the minute any one of them called for a halt to work, then I'd give their claims about safety some credit. They've been screaming about "safety" and "alignment" for years, but -because LLMs are impossible to secure against code injection- their products are fundamentally unsafe and always have been... I just don't trust their claims about a commitment to actual safety.
My read on their recent calls for a global "stop work" emergency cord is that they're very soon to (if they haven't already) reach a point where they will not be able to produce products that are sufficiently improved over the previous versions to justify the level of investment required for their development.
My prediction is that Anthropic and OpenAI will get serious barriers to entry of new competitors enshrined in Federal law, they will call for a "pause" or a "slowdown" in new research for "safety" reasons, and the US will attempt to engage in economic warfare with any countries that don't agree to force their domestic LLM companies to stop working on those LLMs.
unless the bitter pill is gone, extraordinarily not this. The capabilities will be limited by the training data we can create to pull information and patterns from
and then we will still be limited by compute, space, and power
mass devaluing of labour isnt particularly believable when everyones predicting that all the big labs are gonna go under trying to subsidize tokens.
Frankly, this appeal comes across as the same kind of impassioned plea that a missionary might make when begging the faithless to repent and come to Christ before it's too late. This weird religiosity some people around here use to talk about AI, ASI and AGI is bizarre. Take what I've quoted and replace the words "progress" and "ASI" with "sinning" and "the Book of Revelations", and the zeal becomes apparent.
power consumption and global climate change should
ASI should be in the top 10k concerns maybe, but way below what to eat for dinner.
much higher on the fears is some hype guy pretending he has made this thing, and giving it access to too much stuff, which it then randomly deletes or misuses
it should also be in thes same range as "what if the dinosaurs came back and ate everyone"
theres tons of progress on that too. same with finding aliens
there are real present concerns to worry about, like genocides, concentration camps for immigrants, food costs next winter, ongoing wars in the middle east and europe, etc
all kinds of actually pressing stuff, that doesnt first require burning a couple trillion dollars and forcing poor people to pay through the teeth for their electricity