Would we be less likely to go extinct if OpenAI forcibly took over Anthropic? (a possible hypothetical: a combined effort of OpenAI and the US government forces a merger). My take: no. Main reasons:
I trust OpenAI leadership less than Anthropic leadership
Race dynamics would not improve due to the other players.
I judge the creation of Anthropic as retrospectively a good choice. At the time I was negative and have become less so.
Similarly, would we be less likely to go extinct if Alphabet forcibly took over OpenAI and Anthropic? My take: yes. Main reasons:
Substantial improvement in race dynamics.
Alphabet has less corporate need for urgent AI advances.
Alphabet has a better security posture.
I judge the creation of OpenAI as retrospectively a bad choice. At the time I was negative and have become more so.
To answer the question as posed: it's very clear to me that xAI and Meta AI are bad for my species, I don't need a hypothetical for that. And I can't do a clean hypothetical where China doesn't exist.
I don't think destroying one megacorp is easier than destroying two, each of half the size. My model: it's easier to destroy a hundred companies with one employee than to destroy one company with a hundred employees, if one is coming in with an external force.
Conditional on OpenAI forcibly taking over Anthropic, it is more likely that Alphabet forcibly takes over OpenAI (or OpenAI forcibly takes over the AI portions of Alphabet). I was more thinking of "what if a freak event caused a forced takeover" rather than "what if corporate murder of AI labs became normal".
Thanks for the thoughtful response.
2OVERmind
Its not clear to me that shutting company 1 and then shutting company 2 later in time is easer than shutting both companies at the same time in the future. I dont really wanna argue for any conclusion though.
Some "intuition pump" of where this pattern dosent hold: if you want to stop 2 snowballs from rolling down the hill stopping only 1 will make the other grow faster and you wont be able to stop it at all. Snowballs collide with eachother and slow themselves down.