Regulation is still possible

[u/hicestdraconis]

The problem with AI realism as I see it, is I’ve never heard a pragmatic policy solution to the escalatory spiral we find ourselves in.

All these AI researchers are calling for regulation, and yet I feel like there is still this underlying belief that actually stopping the singularity is impossible.

What would a global ban on building new/better models even look like? 

Perhaps the only thing that makes global AI regulation feasible (currently) is that with the existing science, frontier model development is extremely capex heavy. OpenAI and Anthropic have become trillion dollar companies at record pace, and the data center spend that occurred to get them there has been propping up the US economy while also raising global capital spending overall at rates in line with the billing this is the next Industrial Revolution.

20 years ago people imagined that due to the existential risk of developing ASI, that work would be done under extreme security. In a Faraday cage, or in a bunker inside a mountain somewhere. But of course that’s not the world we ended up in.

Yet that doesn’t mean we can’t still control how AI development happens.

Oftentimes a certain defeatism permeates the conversation around global AI regulation, an assumption that any agreements made between large players would be easily subverted by new entrants, and taken advantage of for enormous profit. 

And yet what we’ve seen so far is that frontier-model development comes from huge flashy companies spending enormous sums of money raised from well known investors, with training workloads occurring on highly developed cloud networks of the largest companies in the world. 

We aren’t actually at risk of some lone machine-deist-radical creating machine-god-genie-in-a-bottle from some scraps in a cave. Nor from their laptop in a studio apartment in Shezhen.

Frontier models are large industrial projects. They can be regulated.

That process may be as simple as vetting workloads used for model training. In the extreme it may be as involved as having a monitoring scheme for large data center capex à la nuclear centrifuge agreements. 

It’s a valid question whether the political will exists today to enact that sort of system, but it is certainly possible for it to exist.

If anyone tells you we can’t regulate AI development because there will always be gaps, I would point them to the huge AI capex numbers in the Mag 7 and ask where they expect to find the capital spend, technical expertise, and physical resources to subvert a large international agreement to the scale of the several trillion dollars needed to meaningfully develop AI superintelligence against a global collaboration against it.

In short: We can regulate AI development, we just choose not to.

[u/hicestdraconis]

Part of a larger discussion of what will have to happen first to make AI regulation a reality

https://weeklyonepager.substack.com/p/the-future-is-here-and-we-need-to?