Edited title to make it more clear this is a link post and that I don’t necessarily endorse the title.
1Re: AI safety summit, one thought I have is that the first couple summits were to some extent captured by the people like us who cared most about this technology and the risks. Those events, prior to the meaningful entrance of governments and hundreds of billions in funding, were easier to 'control' to be about the AI safety narrative. Now, the people optimizing generally for power have entered the picture, captured the summit, and changed the narrative for the dominant one rather than the niche AI safety one. So I don't see this so much as a 'stark reversal' so much as a return to status quo once something went mainstream.
4
2xAI's new planned scaleup follows one more step on the training compute timeline from Situational Awareness (among other projections, I imagine)
From ControlAI newsletter:
"xAI has announced plans to expand its Memphis supercomputer to house at least 1,000,000 GPUs. The supercomputer, called Collosus, already has 100,000 GPUs, making it the largest AI supercomputer in the world, according to Nvidia."
Unsure if it's built by 2026 but seems plausible based on quick search.
Something I'm worried about now is some RFK Jr/Dr. Oz equivalent being picked to lead on AI...
Realized I didn't linkpost on lesswrong, only forum - link to Reuters:
https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/us-government-commission-pushes-manhattan-project-style-ai-initiative-2024-11-19/
From Reuters:
"We've seen throughout history that countries that are first to exploit periods of rapid technological change can often cause shifts in the global balance of power," Jacob Helberg, a USCC commissioner and senior advisor to software company Palantir's CEO, told Reuters.
I think it is true that (setting aside AI risk concerns), the US gov should, the moment it recognizes AGI (smarter than human AI) is possible, pursue it. It's the best use of resources, could lead to incredible economic/productivity/etc. growth, could lead to a decisive advantage over adversaries, could solve all sorts of problems.
"China is racing towards AGI ... It's critical that we take them extremely seriously," Helberg added.
This does not seem true to me though, unless Helberg and all have additional evidence. From the Dwarkesh podcast recently, it seemed to me (to be reductionist) that both Gwern and SemiAnalysis doubted China was truly scaling/AGI-pilled (yet). So this seems a bit more of a convenient statement from Helberg, and the next quote describes this commission as hawkish on China.
The USCC, established by Congress in 2000, provides annual recommendations on U.S.-China relations. Known for its hawkish policy proposals, the commission aims to guide lawmakers on issues of economic and strategic competition with China.
Yeah oops, meant long
In school and out of it, I’d been told repeatedly my sentences were run-on, which, probably fair enough. I do think varying sentence length is nice, and trying to give your reader easier to consume media is nice. But sometimes you just wanna go on a big long ramble about an idea with all sorts of corollaries which seem like they should be a part of the main sentence, and it’s hard to know if they really should be a part of their own sentence. Probably, but maybe I defer too much to everyone who ever told me, this is a run-on.