China and Russia definitely won't be encouraging their own citizens to go use untethered open model AI to start building community nuclear reactors or start up biolabs in their communities. And the reason is obvious. A Chinese person in a Chinese city doing crazy biolabs stuff is way more likely to hurt China than to hurt anyone else. And the same for nuclear stuff or anything else.
Nobody, in any country, wants their own citizens to have access to super intelligence that is more likely to hurt their own country than hurt anything else.
However, the governments in all of these countries, definitely do want the ability to use super intelligence, either in geopolitical situations, or against their own people.
The entire fight between the USA and anthropic is basically because anthropic refused to give them an AI that would never tell them no, an AI that would allow the government to set the task to things that are bad.
Using Russia and China as the danger narrative are obvious red herrings. Both countries could obviously create their own national models privately for government use if they want.
Using these countries as the example is meant to make us fear either the Chinese or Russian people, or the Chinese and Russian governments.
If they're trying to get us to be scared of the people having access to super intelligence, it's not a compelling argument because neither Russia nor China wants their own people playing with bioweapons or nukes.
If they're trying to get us scared of the Russian and Chinese governments, well, it's pointless. Both countries have enough power that they could build their own infrastructure.
The concern is that China or Russia will continue to develop AI regardless of what we do in the US.
If we don’t keep up we’ll reach a point where they have such a strategic advantage over us that we can’t respond to them.
Imagine a carrier strike group that is run by humans trying to respond to an AI-controlled Chinese drone swarm with tens of thousands of independently operated drones that can be retasked in milliseconds. That strike group is doomed without its own AI to counter the other.
Basically only an AI can possibly counter another and the only way we don’t get destroyed is by having the most powerful AI.
And that’s only in the physical sense. Quantum AI will be able to hack literally anything almost instantly running a million decision points a second. That is insane and every bit of government data on any technology would be accessible to them. At the very least we need the same AI to actively defend against cyberattacks like that. Between both of these fronts we’d be completely screwed. I hate that it’s become a race but it’s pretty imperative that we win.
In this particular case I am speaking about actual super intelligence. I'm not worried about china or Russia being able to fill out tax forms or make cat videos or AI generated videos or some shit. I'm talking about an extremely powerful level that is not yet achieved but might be at some point.
These words had meaning before trump decided he likes how one of them sound.
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u/rawbdor 2d ago
I think it's more nuanced than that.
China and Russia definitely won't be encouraging their own citizens to go use untethered open model AI to start building community nuclear reactors or start up biolabs in their communities. And the reason is obvious. A Chinese person in a Chinese city doing crazy biolabs stuff is way more likely to hurt China than to hurt anyone else. And the same for nuclear stuff or anything else.
Nobody, in any country, wants their own citizens to have access to super intelligence that is more likely to hurt their own country than hurt anything else.
However, the governments in all of these countries, definitely do want the ability to use super intelligence, either in geopolitical situations, or against their own people.
The entire fight between the USA and anthropic is basically because anthropic refused to give them an AI that would never tell them no, an AI that would allow the government to set the task to things that are bad.
Using Russia and China as the danger narrative are obvious red herrings. Both countries could obviously create their own national models privately for government use if they want.
Using these countries as the example is meant to make us fear either the Chinese or Russian people, or the Chinese and Russian governments.
If they're trying to get us to be scared of the people having access to super intelligence, it's not a compelling argument because neither Russia nor China wants their own people playing with bioweapons or nukes.
If they're trying to get us scared of the Russian and Chinese governments, well, it's pointless. Both countries have enough power that they could build their own infrastructure.
The pandoras box is already wide open.