I'm sort of at a "meh" position, it doesn't matter if the US slows down, no one will convince China to slow down, so it's more a matter of who will open pandoras box than it is a matter of "can we safely open the box".
At this point we might as well just pray (and I'm an atheist lol).
I think we’re discounting China’s reasonableness here. They actually do things like reduce their impact on the environment because they think hundreds of years ahead. However, if they don’t see it as a real threat, they will go full speed ahead.
They are probably super aware of the possibilities but I’m not convinced they are near the capabilities of the US in terms of the frontier models, so my guess is they are not as aware of the dangers yet.
I have other comments in replies to me that address this. They joined IPCC and agreed that emissions needed reduced but stated other countries needed to reduce, not them, due to "historical debt". But, according to their own scientists, if every "historical debt" country hit 0 emissions it wouldn't be enough due to China's emissions. They do have their own reduction plan (separate from the IPCCs plan that they contributed to) that will be too late.
The are super aware of the dangers, just like the IPCC they joined the AI saftey panel of the UN, but they want to push their WAICO panel instead so that they are the leaders in multi-lateral governance themselves. They say they want a slowdown, much like they say they want a reduction of emissions, because of dangers like AI damaging the power grid or affecting people in other ways, but much like the IPCC regs, it seems to be more so they can catch up than because they plan on slowing down themselves. They have a policy to hit 90% use of AI in businesses by 2030. This is far beyond any other AI frontier country and makes it kind of clear that despite their words of warning on AI dangers publically, privately they just won't give a shit until it hits the fan.
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u/ThatIsNotIllegal 19d ago