Nathaniel Whittemore

He said, We are many years ahead of China in our ability to make chips, so I think it would be a big mistake to ship these chips.

I think this is crazy.

It's a bit like selling nuclear weapons to North Korea.

Amadei continued, The CEO of the Chinese companies say it's the embargo on chips that's holding us back.

They explicitly say this.

And at this point, it's basically the only area where we are meaningfully ahead.

While DeepMind CEO Hassabis doesn't share Amadei's dire concerns about China, he does think people need to update their mental framework about China's capabilities.

He reiterated his notion that China is about six months behind the West, but he also reiterated the fact that he doesn't think that so far the Chinese labs have shown they're able to innovate past what the Western labs can do.

He said, they're very good at catching up to where the frontier is and increasingly capable of that.

But I think they've yet to show they can innovate beyond the frontier.

Now, interestingly, all of this brought up the question of how society should respond.

And in fact, a couple of times they were asked if they could, if they would pause and slow down.

Now, if you're sitting there thinking to yourself, everything about what you just heard, from the very framing of the question to the response itself, is sort of irrelevant in a world where there's absolutely no way that you're going to get that sort of cooperation, I think Anthropic's Dario sounds like he would agree with you.

Now, as you might imagine, the AI pause folks were out in force after this.

Michael Trasi retweeted one of these clips and said, four months after our hunger strike, Demis Hassabis finally agreed that he would pause if everyone else also paused.

However, we can't have only one company say that.

This requires international coordination.

To get up on my soapbox for a minute, it is not that I am unsympathetic to the folks who are concerned about the magnitude of social disruption that AI could represent.

I tend to have a different sense than many of those folks about the way that things play out on many vectors, including the particular nature of job disruption, what I believe is their underestimation of humans' continued desire to interact with and have humans doing things for them and with them, and many other points as well.

But I also believe that simple humility demands that we take this seriously, which is why I find it so frustrating the amount of energy that's poured into the made-for-social-media positions like pause AI for six months or data center moratorium, a policy which would so clearly do the exact opposite thing of what its lead advocate Bernie Sanders is actually asking for, which is ensuring the benefits of the technology work for everyone.