Huh, fwiw I thought this proposal would increase AI risk, since it would increase competitive dynamics (and generally make coordinating on slowing down harder). I at least didn’t read this post as x-risk motivated (though I admit I was confused what it’s primary motivation was).
I read it as aiming to reduce AI risk by increasing the cost of scaling.
I also don’t see how breaking deepmind off from Google would increase competitive dynamics. Google, Microsoft, Amazon and other big tech partners are likely to be pushing their subsidiaries to race even faster since they are likely to have much less conscientiousness about AI risk than the companies building AI. Coordination between DeepMind and e.g. OpenAI seems much easier than coordination between Google and Microsoft.
Less than a year ago Deepmind and Google Brain were two separate companies (both making cutting-edge contributions to AI development). My guess is if you broke off Deepmind from Google you would now just pretty quickly get competition between Deepmind and Google Brain (and more broadly just make the situation around slowing things down a more multilateral situation).
But more concretely, anti-trust action makes all kinds of coordination harder. After an anti-trust action that destroyed billions of dollars in economic value, the ability to get people in the same room and even consider coordinating goes down a lot, since that action itself might invite further anti-trust action.
AI labs tend to partner with Big Tech for money, data, compute, scale etc. (e.g. Google Deepmind, Microsoft/OpenAI, and Amazon/Anthropic). Presumably to compete better? If they they’re already competing hard now, then it seems unlikely that they’ll coordinate much on slowing down in the future.
Also, it seems like a function of timelines: antitrust advocates argue that breaking up firms / preventing mergers would slow industry down in the short-run but speed up in the long-run by increasing competition, but if competition is usually already healthy, as libertarians often argue, then antitrust interventions might slow down industries in the long-run.
Huh, fwiw I thought this proposal would increase AI risk, since it would increase competitive dynamics (and generally make coordinating on slowing down harder). I at least didn’t read this post as x-risk motivated (though I admit I was confused what it’s primary motivation was).
I read it as aiming to reduce AI risk by increasing the cost of scaling.
I also don’t see how breaking deepmind off from Google would increase competitive dynamics. Google, Microsoft, Amazon and other big tech partners are likely to be pushing their subsidiaries to race even faster since they are likely to have much less conscientiousness about AI risk than the companies building AI. Coordination between DeepMind and e.g. OpenAI seems much easier than coordination between Google and Microsoft.
Less than a year ago Deepmind and Google Brain were two separate companies (both making cutting-edge contributions to AI development). My guess is if you broke off Deepmind from Google you would now just pretty quickly get competition between Deepmind and Google Brain (and more broadly just make the situation around slowing things down a more multilateral situation).
But more concretely, anti-trust action makes all kinds of coordination harder. After an anti-trust action that destroyed billions of dollars in economic value, the ability to get people in the same room and even consider coordinating goes down a lot, since that action itself might invite further anti-trust action.
AI labs tend to partner with Big Tech for money, data, compute, scale etc. (e.g. Google Deepmind, Microsoft/OpenAI, and Amazon/Anthropic). Presumably to compete better? If they they’re already competing hard now, then it seems unlikely that they’ll coordinate much on slowing down in the future.
Also, it seems like a function of timelines: antitrust advocates argue that breaking up firms / preventing mergers would slow industry down in the short-run but speed up in the long-run by increasing competition, but if competition is usually already healthy, as libertarians often argue, then antitrust interventions might slow down industries in the long-run.