Tim Fist

Yeah, maybe it's worth talking a little bit about what timeline that we're talking about here, because that's sort of very relevant for what the incentives are, what's actually possible in terms of technology development and like how quickly we need to act on all this.

So if you talk to a lot of people at the Frontier Labs, they are saying that they expect to reach a level of AI system that can do recursive self-improvement within 18 months.

If true, that's extremely scary.

We only have like a small amount of time to act if you really want to come up with a verification regime and sort of an agreement that encompasses these kinds of systems.

And the challenge there is if you look at the timeline for needing to make changes to hardware.

So let's say, okay, we could set up a verification regime, but we need to do these design changes to AI chips to make it happen.

That timeline of 18 months might be prohibitive.

So

To give you a sense, let's say I had a design ready to go that's like, here's the verifiable chip that everyone can use and we're all going to be safe and be able to trust each other.

Design changes like that need to be locked like a year in advance before the chip is first manufactured.

So that means my super verifiable chip is first going to go into production in about a year's time.

then it's going to be at least another year before that chip is manufactured at the kind of volumes required before it makes up like a majority of the world's compute.

So we're looking at in total sort of two years minimum from today, assuming that I had my design ready to go before that affordance is out in the world and sort of like allowing a verification regime to happen.

So if we're looking at that kind of timeline, we really need to think about what can today's technologies and the technologies of six months from now do to support a kind of basic muddling through kind of verification regime.

On the incentive side, I think where I would start is that we don't have commitments from the Frontier Labs yet, but we have statements that they're all worried about this.

And these are all companies that have massive budgets.

They could invest in the kind of technologies needed to kind of test this out.

An initial use case that you can imagine is, let's say, OpenA and Anthropic want to do a mutual verification regime between them, where they set up a data center, they run tests on those data centers, they train some models, they figure out how can we make claims to this other party using the kind of technologies we talked about today.

That then can create sort of a technical basis

that allows governments to have more trust in relying on this technology in a more broad-based way and sync up with efforts that are now already underway that we mentioned earlier between the US and China.