I’ve only just CTL-F’d the report so I could have missed something, but I guess the key question for me is what does a multilateral project mean in terms of security/diffusion of the technology?
My intuition is that preventing diffusion of the tech in a multilateral project would be hard, if not impossible and I see this as consideration as something that could kill the desirability of such a project by itself, even if there are several other strong arguments in favour.
I know you mention this in the potential future work section, but I do think it is worthwhile editing in a paragraph or two on why you think we might want to consider this model anyway (it’s impossible to address everyone’s pet objection, but my guess is that this will prove to be one of the major objections that people make).
Sorry for the slow response here! Agree that diffusion is an important issue. A few thoughts:
Some forms of diffusion might be actively good, for reducing concentration of power. So it’s not clear that we want to straightforwardly prevent tech diffusion
Ways you could reduce tech diffusion within something like Intelsat:
Limited membership helps
You could do things like require companies it contracts with to comply with strong infosec, require members not to allow frontier development without strong infosec, require member governments to provide gov-level infosec to frontier developers in their countries
Intelsat for satellites involved sharing all the technical information. For AGI, it could involve sharing only some forms of information (e.g. weights don’t get shared with everyone, but encrypted chunks of the weights are distributed among founder members)
h/t Will: having many countries part of the multilateral project removes their incentives to try to develop frontier AI themselves (and potentially open-source)
Sorry for the slow response here! Agree that diffusion is an important issue. A few thoughts:
Some forms of diffusion might be actively good, for reducing concentration of power. So it’s not clear that we want to straightforwardly prevent tech diffusion
Ways you could reduce tech diffusion within something like Intelsat:
Limited membership helps
You could do things like require companies it contracts with to comply with strong infosec, require members not to allow frontier development without strong infosec, require member governments to provide gov-level infosec to frontier developers in their countries
Intelsat for satellites involved sharing all the technical information. For AGI, it could involve sharing only some forms of information (e.g. weights don’t get shared with everyone, but encrypted chunks of the weights are distributed among founder members)
h/t Will: having many countries part of the multilateral project removes their incentives to try to develop frontier AI themselves (and potentially open-source)
I’ve only just CTL-F’d the report so I could have missed something, but I guess the key question for me is what does a multilateral project mean in terms of security/diffusion of the technology?
My intuition is that preventing diffusion of the tech in a multilateral project would be hard, if not impossible and I see this as consideration as something that could kill the desirability of such a project by itself, even if there are several other strong arguments in favour.
I know you mention this in the potential future work section, but I do think it is worthwhile editing in a paragraph or two on why you think we might want to consider this model anyway (it’s impossible to address everyone’s pet objection, but my guess is that this will prove to be one of the major objections that people make).
Sorry for the slow response here! Agree that diffusion is an important issue. A few thoughts:
Some forms of diffusion might be actively good, for reducing concentration of power. So it’s not clear that we want to straightforwardly prevent tech diffusion
Ways you could reduce tech diffusion within something like Intelsat:
Limited membership helps
You could do things like require companies it contracts with to comply with strong infosec, require members not to allow frontier development without strong infosec, require member governments to provide gov-level infosec to frontier developers in their countries
Intelsat for satellites involved sharing all the technical information. For AGI, it could involve sharing only some forms of information (e.g. weights don’t get shared with everyone, but encrypted chunks of the weights are distributed among founder members)
h/t Will: having many countries part of the multilateral project removes their incentives to try to develop frontier AI themselves (and potentially open-source)
Sorry for the slow response here! Agree that diffusion is an important issue. A few thoughts:
Some forms of diffusion might be actively good, for reducing concentration of power. So it’s not clear that we want to straightforwardly prevent tech diffusion
Ways you could reduce tech diffusion within something like Intelsat:
Limited membership helps
You could do things like require companies it contracts with to comply with strong infosec, require members not to allow frontier development without strong infosec, require member governments to provide gov-level infosec to frontier developers in their countries
Intelsat for satellites involved sharing all the technical information. For AGI, it could involve sharing only some forms of information (e.g. weights don’t get shared with everyone, but encrypted chunks of the weights are distributed among founder members)
h/t Will: having many countries part of the multilateral project removes their incentives to try to develop frontier AI themselves (and potentially open-source)