The two-layer design is right, and there is a physical reason. Ideas are information, and information leaks: the US tried to export-control cryptography in the 1990s and failed completely. Compute is physical, and physical things can be verified, the way fissile material was under the NPT. So open research plus restricted hardware is the right split. But it means the whole plan depends on one variable: does frontier AI stay compute-hungry? If algorithmic efficiency keeps letting last year's frontier run on ordinary hardware, the world is licensed on paper ... (read more)
The two-layer design is right, and there is a physical reason. Ideas are information, and information leaks: the US tried to export-control cryptography in the 1990s and failed completely. Compute is physical, and physical things can be verified, the way fissile material was under the NPT. So open research plus restricted hardware is the right split. But it means the whole plan depends on one variable: does frontier AI stay compute-hungry? If algorithmic efficiency keeps letting last year's frontier run on ordinary hardware, the world is licensed on paper ... (read more)