Domestic companies are the ones that are key.
Erik Hoel 23, 2-28-2023; Erik Hoel is an American neuroscientist and neurophilosopher. Hoel holds a PhD in neuroscience from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and in 2018 was recipient of the Forbes 30 Under 30 – Science award. He currently works as a research assistant professor at Tufts University. Hoel was previously a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of Rafael Yuste at Columbia University and a visiting fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. His main areas of research are the study and philosophy of consciousness, cognition, biological function of dreams, and mathematical theories of emergence. He is noted for using information theory and causal analysis to develop mathematical models to explore and understand the basis of consciousness and dreams.; "How to navigate the AI apocalypse as a sane person", The Intrinsic Perspective, https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/how-to-navigate-the-ai-apocalypse, Thanks Arthur
You don’t need to get everyone on Earth to agree to stop building AI, because the only people on the entire planet capable of building Bing/Sydney level AIs are a handful of teams at Big Tech companies. It’s often said that the cost of a high-level AI researcher is equivalent to an NFL quarterback. Even outside of salaries, the cost of these companies is immense, likely around $600,000 a day to run ChatGPT, the upkeep and personnel costs are even greater (in the billions), and these companies are the only ones with access to the amount of data needed for training, as well as the only ones who can do the careful crafting of human feedback to create the most advanced versions.
@ericjang11
I worry that investment into LLM/generative AI companies is way too exuberant right now, precisely for this reason. I estimate there are <200 people on the planet right now who know how to productively train 100B+ parameter models with startup resources (I am not one of them).
@jacobkimmel
building a company on large ML models is humorously closer to biotech than traditional software
- niche, shallow talent market
- long iteration times
- material capital requirements
- likely need an incumbent partner for distribution
11:51 PM ∙ Feb 20, 2023
It will always be extremely expensive and legally risky to run AGIs, and it will be the provenance solely of Google, Microsoft/OpenAI, Amazon, and the like, as they are big enough to handle the risk. That’s a very small target to apply social/governmental/regulatory pressure to. In fact, if the public will were there, AI research is far easier to control than nuclear weapons right now, because in the latter case you’re dealing with nations who have armies. Microsoft does not have an army, it’s a big bureaucracy with good snacks and stock options.