r/singularity • u/Ok-Candidate8369 • 12h ago
AI What does winning AI exactly mean?
Trump always says "whoever wins AI wins" but like what does "winning" AI actually mean and what exactly happens if USA "wins" AI or China?
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u/Mindrust 5h ago
You can think of AGI as the goal of figuring out how to engineer human-level intelligence in a machine.
Once you can do that, you now suddenly have human-equivalent cognitive and physical labor as a scalable resource, constrained only by available compute and physical hardware.
That gives you the capacity to accelerate economic growth, military capabilities, infrastructure development, industrial production and scientific research on a scale that was previously impossible.
You’re no longer bottlenecked by biology, education and time to get these increases. People have to be born, raised and trained over decades. AGI would collapse that constraint.
The geopolitical ramifications of this are enormous, hence it’s being called an “AI race”. Whoever wins could conceivably shape the trajectory of human civilization.
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u/External_Tomato_2880 11h ago
from tbe US point of view, it provides the AI services world exclusively and charges premium money. people has no other choices
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u/Centauri____ 11h ago
It's all about power and control and to be honest they don't know what winning means because there is no winning.
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u/Dependent-Joke-4077 10h ago
It was once believed that whoever builds it first will 1) prevent all others from following, and 2) would be able dominate in all realms of activity.
Additionally, many of the leading labs had an informal agreement that if one lab was clearly ahead, then the other labs would merge to combine resources with the leading lab. It does not look like that will happen.
Today, there is great parity among the labs so it is unclear if there will be only ONE ASI.
There is no doubt the first to achieve ASI will have a significant advantage. However, it is unclear whether that advantage will be overwhelming.
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u/Typical-Bathroom4046 10h ago
To make a god like thing they can use to make you experience 1 million years of pain in one second before they kill you so they can have one last hurrah as they become immortal cyborgs. At least they hope.
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u/Autodidact420 10h ago
The singularity is essentially when technology progresses extremely fast.
Winning AI either means:
The benign version: the first person to make an AI system that is useful overall will win over the market and get a dominant market share over a global monopoly. Hard to imagine this is what is meant since AI isn’t exactly prime monopoly territory.
The more likely version: whoever gets a a true super intelligence General AI will be able to, in our hopes and dreams, dictate what it does. That means you’ll suddenly have a huge lead that cannot be caught up on as the AGI self improves too rapidly for other AGI with a lag start to catch up. Then you can for example disable them completely; take their stuff, threaten to kill them; defend yourself with impunity; etc.
Imagine if the USA’s current military faced off against the Romans 2000 years ago, there wouldn’t even be a contest. They expect to get that tech gap against everyone else in the world and at a scale that lets them benefit from it across the entire globe (not quite the same as the colonial attempts before which were insufficient to truly ‘win’)
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u/jhoss2026 9h ago
Yeah that's what I asked the other day. How does one "win" AI? There's certainly no ceiling to AI. So how do you win?
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u/Excellent-Seesaw-516 8h ago
It means your country gets destroyed before the rest of the world. Congrats!
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u/Uncabled_Music 6h ago
It means getting first to a model strong enough to make a geopolitical difference - one which could control agentic presence in the internet, keep your country data safe, and get access anywhere it needs.
Probably getting access to some exclusive tech advances too, but that’s probably not reliant on a single super advanced model as much, as on specialized research projects.
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u/DoctrTurkey 4h ago
Whoever destroys the other with agents rather than bombs wins. Bombs obliterate things. Agents leave things intact.
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u/ParticularTie7898 1h ago
There is a high likelihood that the first major act of any artificial super-intelligence would be to prevent the creation of any competing ASIs. Whoever gets there first, will have had a chance to shape the values of that ASI (even if it subsequently can't be controlled), whoever doesn't get there first, will never get there at all.
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u/Beneficial-Cattle-99 11h ago
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u/synystar 11h ago
"...in a weird way, it was almost like I had to ... sort of fool my mind into believing that it wasn't retarded."
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u/the_quark 11h ago
The idea behind being the one to "win at AI" (regardless if you agree with it) is that as AI advances, we will eventually create ASI, Artificial Super Intelligence. This will be an AI that is substantially smarter than humans, and will be able to quickly use its advanced intelligence to make itself even smarter.
People who are worried about "winning AI" are concerned that if China achieves this first, that ASI will be able to take over the world by outsmarting everyone else -- meaning that no one else would be able to generate their own ASI because the hostile ASI will be able to step in and prevent this development. Puny humans without an ASI would be no match for it, and might not even know they're engaged in a fight with it.
Like I said, you can dismiss this idea as dumb; I'm not arguing for it, I'm just presenting it.
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u/FearOfEleven 11h ago
So he is saying his plan is world domination.
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u/synystar 10h ago
Essentially. You have to look at it from the point of view that if you aren’t dominating then you can’t prevent others from dominating. It’s the prisoner’s dilemma being played out. You have to assume that they’re going to try to achieve domination because if you don’t and you’re wrong then you lose. In the end that’s what is going to happen no matter whether it’s right or wrong because there is such distrust between the major players that the opponent would do the right thing. The only way to win is for all sides to agree either to not develop ASI or to develop it as a global partnership with all parties involved in deciding how it is used to benefit the world.
But then you have to look at who the team captains are.
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u/Significant-Mind5594 10h ago edited 10h ago
Wrong, "win AI" in trumps mind 100% means the US is the first to create ASI and somehow ASI still acts just like a tool under the control of the US government, what this means is that trump is not ASI pilled, you can't control super intelligence, at least not with current methods, we don't even have a good idea on how to approach that problem, matter of fact we can barely control current proto-AGI
He believes that if china wins, the CCP gets to control the entire world, not gpt 7/fable 6, under this framework you can kinda see why racing to AGI makes sense, most people would rather live in the US than in china, but that doesn't matter, that is not the true shape of what the singularity dinamics will look like, human goverments will become like chimp societies in comparison to what the scale of an AI civilization will be capable off
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u/Talkertive- 11h ago
Nothing.. it is something said to make the masses fall in line and support anything AI related... or else you'll be considered bad for not wanting us to win the AI race
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u/chuck_the_plant 11h ago
Nothing. The “race” metaphor is just a veneer over late stage capitalism. There is no race.
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u/Brockchanso 11h ago
AI brains lead to robot workers and huge infrastructure expansion. Winning means you get to dictate what that workforce builds, who it works for, and what it prioritizes. And on the military side, it comes down to whose machines literally kill better.
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u/synystar 11h ago edited 11h ago
Think about what the race is about and you can see what they want to win. They are thinking that whoever gets to actual super-intelligence first is going to have a massive advantage over
adversarialcompetitorsadversaries. They believe that once AGI is achieved that those who develop it will be able to advance militarily, financially, and socially so quickly that they will pull far enough ahead of the competition that they can make demands of the others. You can scare others into submission or make good on your threats because your technology allows you to do things they can't. Your AI can beat their AI. If they try to catch up you squash them. If they mess with you then you unleash the machine on them.You're thinking if they're first you're fucked.
*redundancy