Tim Fist

Yeah, so I don't have rigorous estimates of the total number of people working on this.

I would say from a technical perspective, I'm pretty sure that I've interacted with basically everyone who's thinking about this problem and working on the engineering side, and it's definitely less than 50.

So the size of this field needs to be massively larger

expanded, I think that luckily there are lots of people in the world with the kind of expertise that's needed for this.

There's lots of fundamental research that goes into things like testing whether a chip is actually tamper-proof and what kind of attacks you can run on it to extract the private key that this cryptography that we talked about relies upon.

There's many thousands of people in the world who work on these exact problems.

and you could create sort of a massive workforce of people who are like rigorously red teaming a verification prototype involving these chips and sort of figuring out what is the attack surface and how do we rapidly patch that.

Obviously people who work in chip design and chip manufacturing and sort of like chip supply chains are really useful for this whole thing if you're trying to think about how do we globally account for where the chips are going and set up proofs about where they're being manufactured and where they are and sort of like tracking those globally as well.

I think that lots of this stuff is a good role for government, especially a lot of the fundamental research here.

And there's already relevant research programs going on in the United States government, especially at places like DARPA.

But also I think the lion's share of this work is likely to be needed to be done by industry.

And I see this being a combination of the frontier labs who have stated sort of an interest in this already, as well as chip companies who are going to be hopefully incentivized to build the kind of technology required if there is some sort of policy requirement for that.

So I think a key role for government to play here is figuring out what incentives to create for industry to start investing in these kinds of technologies and figure out what's required.

Yeah, I would say that this idea of making location verification a requirement for chips that are exported overseas is part of this broader class of interventions that I find really promising that we've been calling conditional export controls.

So for those who aren't familiar, the US government currently has a whole bunch of authorities to regulate the exports of AI chips and manufacturing equipment.

So it decides who is able to receive those chips, you need a license to do it, and the terms under which they can do it.

And currently the way this has been implemented is based on the performance specifications of the chip.

So you can basically say, if the chip is more powerful than this amount, it cannot go to somewhere like China.

Instead, you could start thinking about this as more of an incentive.

So you can kind of say, by default, we won't export a chip if it's over this performance threshold.