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Comment by dgellow | Hacker News Reader

We don’t even need something that powerful, you can control the hardware manufacturers and distributors. If you control GPUs, HBM, and the hardware needed to cool all that down and provide the power, that’s enough to make it very hard to scale up the risk.

You cannot really hide an AI datacenter consuming GW of power for too long.

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Except no one country controls all that. And if you put limits on it, other countries will speed up doing it themselves.

If you stop going "nobody will do anything actually effective", and start going "how do we do something actually successful", any number of successful ideas start readily arising. It is possible to stop. Not easy, but possible.

Like a war or something? I can't think of a successful non-bad way for everyone to stop besides a treaty.

Outside of the current nonsense in Iran, we've never had to go to war to prevent nuclear arms. We've never had to go to war to ban weapons in space. These things are possible. Hard but possible

That's why treaties sound reasonable to me. Though I'd imagine they would be more like Climate Change ones. Before Iran there were bombings to stop nuclear arms. Imagine a country getting bombed because it's detected their building a data center.

> we've never had to go to war to prevent nuclear arms. We've never had to go to war to ban weapons in space

We've mostly been blindsided by covert nuclear programmes. As for weapons in space, they don't have any purpose. The moment they make sense we'll see weapons in space.

US + South Korea + Taiwan gives a control over pretty much all the hardware used for AI training and inference. Of course having a psychopath president like Trump doesn’t really help at anything that requires international collaboration

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