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Comment by solenoid0937 | Hacker News Reader

This is a very naive viewpoint that does not understand that superintelligence is a race between the West and China.

While the EU is twiddling its thumbs about copyright, it is shooting its own side in the foot during the most important race in human history.

The pure absurdity of this is a reflection of how the EU routinely chooses short term safety and good vibes over long term prosperity and success. This mindset is why the EU has been utterly unable to compete for years -- and now, they want to impose their failed model on the actually successful Western companies.

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> the most important race in human history

This feels like it needs a lot of asterisks. A race implies someone will win it - how exactly is China winning by making those models freely available? "The West" can use that tech, it's not locked away in some vault.

This is a very easy question to answer: they're commoditizing AI and compressing margins for the US labs, while their state funds large scale buildouts. It's a decelerating force for the US because it removes dollars that the labs would otherwise put into R&D.

Obviously China will not release models if they ever get far ahead of the US's best models in capability. You can't seriously think that "free models" will remain the game plan if they take an indisputable lead?

But how is it relevant to the EU right now? It seems like sitting it out and spending that money on weapons is a better option for EU money as it solves an immediate danger.

Why would we need to worry about China getting far ahead of US models given the spending trajectory of US companies? If China does get ahead, US companies will just keep pumping more money into the problem to keep the race going. But to what end? LLMs are not going to morph into AGI, that will be a new paradigm.

For most people, the best LLM is the one that is cheapest to them, as models are incredibly good. I'd wager ~90% of people using AI today wouldn't be able to differentiate GPT Sol from GLM 5.3 Flash in their day-to-day usage. The models are already good enough today for most workloads, next year's model won't change that.

> Why would we need to worry about China getting far ahead of US models

If China gets to superintelligence first, the EU is cooked. This is a regime that has permanently disappeared tens of thousands of their human rights lawyers.

> will just keep pumping more money into the problem to keep the race going

Do you think taxing the US companies at 3% of global turnover and twiddling thumbs over copyright helps or hurts the West in the race to superintelligence?

> most workloads, next year's model won't change that.

"Most workloads" are irrelevant, the models matter only at the edge of the hardest problems they can solve, you are thinking of these models like any other technology when they will soon solve incredibly difficult problems that may give one country a real edge over the other.

> If China gets to superintelligence first, the EU is cooked.

If it's as dangerous as you say, the first country that will get to this will be in big trouble, regardless of who they are.

> Do you think taxing the US companies at 3% of global turnover and twiddling thumbs over copyright helps or hurts the West in the race to superintelligence?

Global turnover taxation was meant to prevent companies using creative accounting to not pay taxes, not to hurt "the West".

> they will soon solve incredibly difficult problems that may give one country a real edge over the other

What is this based on aside from AI hype?

Yes, that's fair, and particularly so for AI. The best action would be to speak softly and carry a big stick.

But ultimately, to avoid the dangers of AI, a control treaty of which the only similar historical example was nuclear weapons, will be needed between the US and China. And perhaps, Europe would be better at negotiating that if it was all three.

Meanwhile, legislating to label deepfakes, and evaluating models for safety, should hardly be controversial. And in an ideal world, the US and China would agree and be collaborating with Europe on doing that, not whining about it. That includes reform of copyright.

It is totally unrealistic to think that any country could regulate the other country's race to superintelligence.

This is a technology that will give the victor control over the future of humanity forever, and the ability to lock out any competitors from reaching the same level of capability.

Do you really think China would sign any agreement here in good faith? It would be hopelessly naive to negotiate a slowdown and assume that China is not lying through their teeth and accelerating internally. The stakes are too high - we would do the same.

The only option is to win the race, because no entity is naively trusting enough to risk losing this race.

Not unrealistic - the same thing happened with nuclear weapons, between two superpowers who were at cold war with each other. China and US now are much more similar to each other.

Of course it won't happen without the threat of mutual annihilation, but superintelligent AI provides that threat.

As to how... Obviously you have to be smart and tough and invent mechanisms to make it work without trust. Plan A has a bunch of ideas to start with https://ai-2040.com/supplements/verification-plan

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