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If you just happened to notice, left out is any acknowledgement of the reality that there are exactly two countries on the AI frontier, the United States and China. They seemingly want the American government to both unilaterally negotiate its own technological restraint and sign an accord with the Chinese Communist Party. Then we will have to trust Beijing to honor these vague, subjective terms. Given that AI doomerism has not proliferated in China in the fashion it has here, this would amount to unilateral technological disarmament.

The “Pacing the Frontier” letter is rife with valuable signatures, and they don’t just come from the hyper wokes within the “trust and safety” teams. Anthropic’s CEO, OpenAI’s chief scientist, Meta’s chief scientist, Google DeepMind’s chief strategy officer, and a long roster of the people who build these systems are signatories to the document.

I can’t help but to point out again that everything hinges on one word in that last sentence: International.

Europe is not in this race or really, any race that involves innovation these days. Mistral, in France, is the one European lab that is kind of sort of doing something interesting, but it’s still rather inconsequential. The continent has built a regulatory apparatus so hostile to building things that its best founders almost always relocate to the United States and incorporate here.

We have seen this appeasing China movie before and we know how it ends.

Take the Paris climate framework as an example. Both the U.S. and China signed the same document, but only the U.S. was baited into action. The United States pledged, in an agreement signed by former President Barack Obama, to drastically cut emissions immediately. This was a hard, near-term number, and the U.S. proceeded to wire billions of dollars into sketchy international climate funds and NGOs. China pledged to let its emissions keep climbing until roughly 2030 and then, at its leisure, to peak. The U.S. bound itself to self destruction while China bought fifteen years of runway and did absolutely nothing to achieve any stated objectives.

How exactly would this committe inspect a frontier AI system’s progress in China? It does not exactly emit gasses that can be picked up by satellite observation. There are no physical inspectors who could verify the compliance of companies within an authoritarian government that presides over a giant land mass and 1.5 billion citizens. A pacing agreement with China would be unverifiable by its nature, which means in practice it slows down exactly one country: ours.

And what exactly are we pacing?

Everyone has a different definition of AI. I think of it as a new technology that encompasses a general-purpose capability and a human productivity tool. If we slow down the frontier and you slow down whatever the frontier was about to produce. Do we tell a man with advanced cancer the bad news that his treatment is now banned because it is violating a subjective “pace” determined by an international committee?

There is no magical dial we can pinpoint that we can command to “slow down only the parts we determine as extra scary.”

Also, who would staff the committee(s)? Presumably, this would mean the signatories themselves, because they are some of the most knowledgeable people in the field, and their contemporaries who disagree with the proposal would not want to join such a committee. They would be handed discretionary power to decide, subjectively, like Soviet commissars, what rate of human progress we are permitted.

Frontier AI companies are raising hundreds of billions of dollars on the promise of the very technological breakthroughs they have achieved in recent months and years. It’s always been a bit paradoxical that these are the same people who are virtue signaling about the need to roll back AI progress. And it seems destined that whatever proposed mechanism gets built will almost certainly determine something that the incumbents can reach and their competitors cannot. Suddenly, the “safeguard” becomes a regulatory moat. Funny how that works out.

The expected rejoinder is that the letter deserves deference because very smart and successful (San Francisco-based liberals) leadership signed it.

But that just proves we have a massive bubble problem in West Coast tech circles. It does not prove that they know the first thing about governing a country, as proven by their historically awful proposal to have an international body usurp the authority of the United States government and our systems of laws and justice.

Being the best in the world at training an AI system confers no expertise in statecraft, treaty enforcement, morality, or constitutional design. And rarely will you be able to acquire the wisdom of the American founding principles by interacting with chatbots. Given their backgrounds, it’s not surprising that they imagine governance as an engineering problem that involves finding the right mechanism, tuning the particular incentives, and voila! Global compliance is achieved. But that’s entirely detached from human nature and the nation state system that governs our politics.

Much of this worldview traces to effective altruism, the movement that has colonized the very loud and intimidating “safety” wings of these companies. Their ideas have very little grounding in the American founding principles that allowed for the flourishing of their respective companies.

What Silicon Valley needs is not a new international body, but an infusion of certain principles that make rational Americans come to the obvious conclusion that self-governing people can handle a powerful technology better than a supranational committee ever can.

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