Tim Fist

But if it has features that make that chip more governable or allow a verification regime to exist, then we'll allow them to go overseas.

And the most obvious near-term version of this is location tracking.

So if your chip has a location verification feature on it, there should be a policy in place that

makes it possible to export that chip to more countries because you've addressed that risk of diversion.

There's a bunch of other incentives you could think about, but that's like something that is fully implementable today using authorities available to the US government.

So NVIDIA is certainly powerful.

I think there's public reporting about them trying to get involved in both personnel and policy decisions that the Department of Commerce, who oversees export controls here, is doing.

And obviously they have a strong incentive to want to export as many chips as possible.

I think...

Congress has pretty different views and often mixed views on this, but I would say the default position in Congress at the moment is they are very worried about foreign adversary countries getting access to AI chips and generally pretty supportive of new export control measures.

And I think the advantage of framing this in terms of conditional export controls is you have a release valve.

you're not just blanket banning chips from going everywhere in the world, but you're offering a sort of way to increase or streamline export of chips if they are designed in a way that sort of gives us what we want, which is the ability to essentially prevent them from being misused.

Yeah, I'll say I think

One just critical precondition to make this all go well is having institutions within government who actually understand these technologies, tracking these risks, and can update based on evidence and provide the appropriate information to, in the US, like the White House, but sort of senior policymakers globally.

Right now in the United States, there is just one organization, the Center for AI Standards Innovation, or CACI, who is responsible with actually tracking the capabilities of frontier models

understanding the trajectory of that risk profile and then reporting to the rest of government on this.

And that is an office with about 30 staff and a budget of about 15 million.

We need to massively level up these kind of capabilities in order to provide policymakers with the information about

whether and when they should work on verification and what kind of R&D programs are required and all the kind of information you need about what is your risk, what is your threat model, when should you act.

Right now, this doesn't really exist in the United States and the state of these kind of institutions globally is still fairly nascent.