Will HaydnBelfield's post "Are you really in a race? The Cautionary Tales of Szilárd and Ellsberg" win any prize in the EA Criticism and Red Teaming Contest?
I don’t see the relevance.
None of the major AI labs claim to be in a “race”
None of them are secretive in any way (they release their papers, and many release their models).
Most everyone thinks China is way behind. And frankly existing “AI” is more than sufficient for face tracking, audio transcription, and total surveillance.
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To the extent this is about govt actors—I give this some credence. (the ban on selling A100’s was beyond idiotic. You can just buy a bunch of used 3080s and get the same compute, and now China might have a reason to develop their own accelerators. But not sure this has any parallels with the ex-post-facto history—obviously the Germans had the best rockets, and many countries soon thereafter had nukes. Not sure it’s reasonable to call it a “mistake” to stay ahead militarily.)