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Comment by nsoonhui | Hacker News Reader

I'm absolutely bewildered that this is the top comment. 'Pacing the frontier,' if eventually enforced, will only affect US companies, not Chinese companies. How do you even 'pace the frontier' for Chinese models, and why should they agree to it?

China doesn't have a good track record of following signed agreements ( the WTO thing comes to mind), and this whole 'pacing the frontier' concept is even less enforceable than a signed agreement. So I would say that Anthropic/OpenAI called for this not because they thought it would eliminate the threat of Chinese models, but in spite of the risk of being overtaken.

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> I'm absolutely bewildered that this is the top comment. 'Pacing the frontier,' if eventually enforced, will only affect US companies

I can address your bewilderment. What I was trying to say is that they don't actually want to pace the frontier at all. They want to gum up the market with regulations they design, that would ultimately force US companies to rent AI from them. They don't need to stop Chinese AI development and cannot do that. But they can, to quote OpenAI's Head of Strategic Futures, "create enough regulatory risk that every regulated enterprise backs off [of using Chinese models]".

https://x.com/deanwball/status/2078133895766114412

That doesn't address the bewilderment. No one is confused about what the tsunami of cynical skeptics who pop up on every thread like this are saying. We get it. We understand what you think is happening.

What's bewildering is the absolute lack of recognition of the fact that IF participants are locked in an arms race, they cannot act unilaterally to disarm. So not disarming doesn't actually say anything about whether they want to.

Now, of course a company not disarming (pacing the frontier, in this case) is not evidence that they ARE locked in an arms race. Everything hinges on the question of whether it's an arms race, and I think there's a great discussion to be had there. But the cynics never even bother to address the question.

All that said, I'm not actually bewildered. HN is way too smart to not understand all this, so my conclusion is that the people talking past each other are having a different emotional reaction to what's happening in the world. The angry bitter cynics are reacting from fear and hatred, and that's where the sloppy motivated reasoning comes from.

So, to be clear, you are just asserting that maybe we should take them at their word? That the story they are telling is in principle plausible? That seems fine to think but that doesn't make the other story less plausible!

Also it seems a little silly to assert that the "angry bitter cynics" are the ones who don't think the world is hurtling to imminent doom or whatever..

I’m saying that the cynics just blow past the key question and seem to assume that of course it’s not an arms race dynamic. And by ignoring that question, it’s pretty clear they just have an axe to grind and don’t actually care about being a rational observer of reality.

So like what's the right way to be then? Just in a sustained meditation on the intrinsic unknowability of the answer to the true/real/key question? Nothing else can be said?

I don't want to be too blunt but it really just seems like you disagree with a certain take people have, but don't just want to say that for whatever reason. I think you might save yourself some bewilderment by just being honest about that to yourself...

I thought me calling their reasoning sloppy and motivated was a clue as to the fact that I disagree. I obviously think it’s an arms race. And like I also said above, I’m not personally bewildered.

>But the cynics never even bother to address the question

You might have sleep past it, but cynics became cynic when this question was just plainly ignored with self assured answers, mostly based on market valuation as the ultimate truth indicator. I guess now days the self assured answer is to accuse critics of "fear and hatred".

Can you point me to where the answers to the question of whether we’re in an arms race were ignored with self-assured answers based on market valuation?

Do you even know what you’re trying to say here?

> I'm absolutely bewildered that this is the top comment. 'Pacing the frontier,' if eventually enforced, will only affect US companies, not Chinese companies. How do you even 'pace the frontier' for Chinese models, and why should they agree to it?

It may make sense if we think of this being tied to US companies. How would Anthropic/OpenAI force US companies to use their products only? They'd have to somehow influence the regulations to ban the Chinese models or any other open weight ones. It's about companies who spend tens and hundreds of millions on tokens staying and keep paying. Not you as an individual or a small startup. They want something like "These companies didn't pace the frontier so their use/output is banned in US" as the angle they want to play.

Anthropic saw that this kind of rhetoric can work. They stepped on their own rake, so to speak, when they drummed up the super-capabilities of the own model, and then didn't kiss the ring the right way and found themselves export controlled.

And why would China pace the frontier when it was the American accelerationist companies who created this mess? I remember scientists calling for an AI slow down way back in 2023 and they were all ridiculed and ignored by those very same companies. There is no way "Pacing the frontier" isn't just a ruse.

The US companies are also claiming the Chinese companies are only where they are at because they're distilling US models. By that logic, if there are no better US models to distill, the Chinese innovation should also stop.