Gwern recently wrote a very interesting thread about Chinese AI strategy and the downsides of US AI racing. It's both quite short and hard to excerpt so here is almost the entire thing with very minimal editing:
Hsu is a long-time China hawk and has been talking up the scientific & technological capabilities of the CCP for a long time, saying they were going to surpass the West any moment now, so I found this interesting when Hsu explains that:
the scientific culture of China is 'mafia' like (Hsu's term, not mine) and focused on legible easily-cited incremental research, and is against making any daring research leaps or controversial breakthroughs...
but is capable of extremely high quality world-class followup and large scientific investments given a clear objective target and government marching orders
there is no interest or investment in an AI arms race, in part because of a "quiet confidence" (ie. apathy/laying-flat) that if anything important happens, China can just catch up a few years later and win the real race. They just aren't doing it. There is no Chinese Manhattan Project. There is no race. They aren't dumping the money into it, and other things, like chips and Taiwan and demographics, are the big concerns which have the focus from the top of the government, and no one is interested in sticking their necks out for wacky things like 'spending a billion dollars on a single training run' without explicit enthusiastic endorsement from the very top.
Let the crazy Americans with their fantasies of AGI in a few years race ahead and knock themselves out, and China will stroll along, and scoop up the results, and scale it all out cost-effectively and outcompete any Western AGI-related stuff (ie. be the BYD to the Tesla). The Westerners may make the history books, but the Chinese will make the huge bucks.
So, this raises an important question for the arms race people: if you believe it's OK to race, because even if your race winds up creating the very race you claimed you were trying to avoid, you are still going to beat China to AGI (which is highly plausible, inasmuch as it is easy to win a race when only one side is racing), and you have AGI a year (or two at the most) before China and you supposedly "win"... Then what?
- race to AGI and win
- trigger a bunch of other countries racing to their own AGI (now that they know it's doable, increasingly much about how to do it, can borrow/steal/imitate the first AGI, and have to do so "before it's too late")
- ???
- profit!
What does winning look like? What do you do next? How do you "bury the body"? You get AGI and you show it off publicly, Xi blows his stack as he realizes how badly he screwed up strategically and declares a national emergency and the CCP starts racing towards its own AGI in a year, and... then what? What do you do in this 1 year period, while you still enjoy AGI supremacy? You have millions of AGIs which can do... stuff. What is this stuff? Are you going to start massive weaponized hacking to subvert CCP AI programs as much as possible short of nuclear war? Lobby the UN to ban rival AGIs and approve US carrier group air strikes on the Chinese mainland? License it to the CCP to buy them off? Just... do nothing and enjoy 10%+ GDP growth for one year before the rival CCP AGIs all start getting deployed? Do you have any idea at all? If you don't, what is the point of 'winning the race'?