If you don't think having a legion of skilled hackers that never sleep is a weapon, fine-- hell, even if you tighten your tinfoil hat and reject the claim that they can even do that,

Let me tighten my tinfoil hat, really quickly. First and foremost, it’s great claims which require equally great evidence. The onus of evidencing (or lack thereof) “never sleeping skilled hacking machines” belongs to the AI companies, not me. So far it’s unsubstantiated. What we really ought be discussing is the plausibility of such a machine, given what we already know.

That’s a whole discussion in itself, which I’m happy to have. I digress, for now.

if the American government and the Chinese government both believe it has this capability, and they both believe it's advantage to have the better technology, then this is an arms race.

We have not met that definition, in my opinion. I don’t believe even the US government is convinced of this. In fact, I’m doubtful anyone is fully convinced.

The Manhattan Project was an arms race between the USSR and the US, which this AI race looks nothing like. We didn’t have to rely on CEOs to tell us as much, either.

I think the US and China were once in recent time more bought into the idea that the recent LLM (and more deeply, the transformer and attention) innovations might lead to more breakthroughs with military applications. Those breakthroughs have been sparse and rather not up to par, like a theoretical never-sleeping-hacking-machine would be. I certainly don’t see any grand scale race between them, militarily speaking. So no… just as (if China were) foreign competition during combustion engine development, I wouldn’t consider that an “arms race.” Especially if the largest surface area in the field was disparate competitors in the market of business to consumer goods.

Where’s the military research programs actually treating this like a priority? DARPA for AI would be something that comes to mind, not this… would this really be the best that the US has to offer in its supposed “arms race?”

Even if they're both wrong about the capabilities of AI or the plausibility of AGI, it’s still an arms race. If the it turned out that atomic bombs weren't feasible or possible to create, that wouldn't have made the race to build one less of an arms race, without hindsight.

I’m arguing that most the reasons it’s a race are political and economical. My issue is with the word “arms.” I would still say it is not an arms race.

If not clear, I don't believe a conspiracy on this scale is a realistic assumption without more data than "I don't believe it". It would have to spread across several competing companies throughout most, if not all, of the employees.

I also don’t believe in a grand conspiracy. My belief is closer to cultural stupidity having gone “off the rails.”

It’s propaganda, CEOs hemorrhaging cash, people buying into the propaganda, every small win gets exacerbated while loses ignored.

My position isn’t unconventional or all that unreasonable, really. It’s a growing position, per my own observations. What’s happening isn’t right.

I think, as I said before, that we will need a global treaty on pausing development before any one country or company pauses development, or even slows it down.

I still say we should worry about ourselves first. That narrative only benefits the tech CEOs. Slowing down now means we can preserve livelihood, plan better, not blow trillions more dollars, and eventually speed back up without risk of crashing.

Right now, the current trajectory causes harm in people’s lives. I don’t buy the argument that this is acceptable without discussion, and that AI companies should get to pick that for us through their pushed narratives.

I also don’t buy that our current trajectory is optimal for arriving at some grander finish line. If you stop and readjust, you might actually “beat China” (for whatever that’s worth).