This! $1.6+ TRILLION in infra spending from the big frontier labs. The earnings needed to drive a reasonable ROI to recoup that investment is simply not going to happen in a time frame where the numbers make sense.
The other insanity in all this the smartest computer scientists in the world are asking Congress to regulate them. Come. On. Really? Do we remember “The internet is not a truck, it’s a series of tubes…”
Why can’t the big labs form a Save The World Consortium and self-regulate?
Non-democratic counties (hey there China) will not abide by any agreement that constrains their advantage. It’s naive to think so.
What this conversation lacks is enough discussion of how these models can cause us harm—we are are so worried about AI but we allow Windows in critical infrastructure; we build JS/TS apps with thousands of dependencies; we generally don’t segment networks well enough; we don’t have adequate (sometimes any) detection capabilities in our systems, and so on.
In a prisoner's dilemma the players can't rely on one another to self-regulate. This is why Mafias kill snitches, so when their members are in a prisoner's dilemma they can rely on the knowledge that if themselves or the other party snitches they have more to lose than gain.
The problem is that there can not be any outside party to regulate this on a global scale
There's plenty of precedent for specific industries self-regulating in the US, typically motivated by the shared view that it would be less disruptive than heavy handed federal regulation.
Applying game theory problems like prisoner's dilemma to the real world requires collapsing a lot of overlapping and conflicting incentives to a single dimension which doesn't always work.
In this case the goal is bringing about the singularity, basically creating a sort of godlike intelligence. That's what the arms race is all about.
So we are in a true prisoner's dilemma, if one of the companies / countries stops R&D it risks handing over godlike power to another company / country.
> Non-democratic counties (hey there China) will not abide by any agreement that constrains their advantage.
The main counterexample to this was nuclear weapons. Atom bombs have not been used to kill since the US did so. However today, the two largest nuclear powers have no legal agreement on arms control because Donald the Trump declined Russia's offer for an extension to the existing agreement. Now other countries are looking at Ukraine, Iran (attacked for wanting nukes) vs NKorea (not attacked because they have them), and Donald's own musings about the US nuclear umbrella being a bad idea (France is going to build more nukes now too)... and we now face nuclear proliferation again on a global scale, with tech that is nearly 100 years old now.
It's severely capacity limited, that's why it's possible and Wall Street wouldn't be interested in it, yet it's too complex for most retail folks without a solid math and game theory background to execute.
There are a handful of niche edges like this lying around that nobody at a quant firm would set up a trade desk around, it's not worth their time but it's meaningful money to someone in a personal capacity.
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