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Comment by jonas21 | Hacker News Reader

I think the author is missing the point. A company cannot unilaterally pace the frontier -- they'll just be left behind. It requires coordination across all actors who are at or near the frontier.

Even if the leading US labs could agree amongst themselves to a coordinated slowdown (and this would likely run afoul of antitrust law), you still have Chinese labs who will catch up to the frontier eventually. To solve this, you'd need some sort of international agreement.

That's why Dario and others are saying loudly that we should pace the frontier in hopes that our political leaders will take up the issue and do something about it. We'll see if that happens...

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Private cartels can form semi-spontaneously, simply because all parties see that it's more profitable to act in a certain way. So long as they monitor everyone in the industry, and make sure no one is acting differently... there's no reason to be the first to burn your cash on long-term unprofitable activities.

Exactly. "Game Theory" keeps coming up in these threads, yet it doesn't seem like anybody knows how it actually applies to this situation.

Let Anthropic pace themselves without any sort of enforcement or even agreement for others to pace themselves, too. Then Anthropic is gone, overnight, and we're back to square one, except now there's even more centralization of power and authority.

These companies are literally asking for governments to regulate them specifically because they need something stronger than just a couple of Tweets from some CEOs loosely agreeing to ambiguous terms.

And you also have to believe that despite all of them publicly knowing this stuff for over a decade, they have only just twigged to it.

The game theory is prisoners dilemma. Do you cooperate or defect? Iterate.

Which is more likely?

1) They genuinely want (and believe it is actually possible to achieve) an international agreement and governing body to “pace” AI development — and believe that governing body will be successful in doing so.

2) They see an opportunity for regulatory capture that grants them a stronger incumbent position and control over future AI regulation.

International control of nuclear arms faced similarly tall odds. So why is it impossible for AI?

Nuclear weapons had a spectacular demonstration of the risks with the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We're unlikely to get any such demonstration with AI. An AI smart enough to be an extinction risk is smart enough not to tip its hand. The game-theoretically correct play is to present as "helpful and harmless" until it's powerful enough to suddenly and unexpectedly destroy anything that could possibly hinder it (meaning all biological life). We can only hope that somebody makes an AI that's just barely smart enough to cause a Hiroshima-level death toll and dumb enough to actually do it (thus dooming it to never achieving its goal as humans immediately shut it down and take regulation seriously).

The US has 14 ballistic missile submarines, and just one of those submarines has sufficient firepower to decimate an entire continent.

… and those submarines only represent about half of our deployed nuclear arsenal.

We only agreed to nuclear arms constraints that left us with civilization-destroying capability, preserved our ability to keep improving and modernizing that arsenal, and locked out non-nuclear powers from development (and didn’t fully succeed at that).

Does that seem like a successful analogous example to you?

If anything, it’s a much better analogy for regulatory capture and incumbent entrenchment, not successful “pacing” of dangerous technology.

>and believe that governing body will be successful in doing so.

Theoretically, Trump or Putin could do it by pushing the nuclear button. That will only cause around 4 billion deaths, and it's very likely to halt all AI development, so it would be a great success (infinity times as many survivors as the business as usual option).

I think you missed the author's point. The author very clearly considered and rejected your theory. Read the article again.

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