What is why?
You never actually say that part, unless it's "It will eventually be taken from you by force" which doesn't seem applicable to this situation or this site?
Nukes are actually a great example of something also gated by resources. Just having the knowledge/plans isn't good enough.
That was never the aim. LLMs are not designed to be generally intelligent, just to be really good at producing believable text.
That's apparently about 6k books' worth of data.
Oh, come on, surely not just a couple months.
Benchmarks may boast some fancy numbers, but I just tried to save some money by trying out Qwen3-Next 80B and Qwen3.5 35B-A3B (since I've recently got a machine that can run those at a tolerable speed) to generate some documentation from a messy legacy codebase. It was nowhere close neither in the output quality nor in performance to any current models that the SaaS LLM behemoth corps offer. Just an anecdote, of course, but that's all I have.
Costs a few hundred thousand per server, it's a huge expense if you want it at your home but a rounding error for most organizations.
Newer Blackwell does 200+ tokens per second on the largest models and tens of thousands on the smaller models. Most military applications require fast smaller models, I'd imagine.
Also, custom chips are reportedly approaching an order of magnitude more for the price. It's a matter of availability right now, but that will be solved at some point.
Was it successful? The jury is still out.
I think that's a key difference as well.
And how would a treaty like that be enforced? Every country has legitimate uses for GPUs, to make a rendering farm or simulations or do anything else involving matrix operations.
All of the technology involved, in more or less the configuration needed to make your own ChatGPT, is dual use.
OK, maybe someone will build a bioweapon that does that for real. :P
Intelligence itself is not dangerous unless only a few orgs control it and it's aligned to those orgs' values rather than human values. The safety narrative is just "intelligence for me, but not for thee" in disguise.
On your second point, see my response to oceanplexian below: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47189385
We live in a free society. AI should be democratized like any other technology.
There are people today who could create such a pathogen, but not many. Widespread access to powerful AI risks lowering the bar enough that we get overlap between "people who want to kill us all" and "people able to kill us all".
This is not a gotcha argument, this is what I work full time on preventing: https://naobservatory.org The world must be in a position to detect attacks early enough that they won't succeed, and we're not there yet.
It's not enough for a handful of people to predict something. You have to get the entire nation onboard to defend against it.
When you only allow gov and big tech access to powerful AI, you create a much more dangerous and unstable world.
Centralizing power is dangerous and leads to power struggles and instability.
We shouldn't expect these people to consider how the logic breaks down one step ahead when it never made sense in the first place.
Funding the majority of HIV prevention in Africa.
The list is long, but you knew that.
If they actually wanted to do something they wouldn’t have sat back and funded Republican political campaigns because they were pissed about the head of the ftc under Biden.
But they didn’t. They gave millions to this guy and now they’re feigning ignorance or change ir wherever this is.
It’s meaningless. Utterly meaningless.
Get what you pay for, I suppose.
https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/alphabet-inc/recipients?id=...
The corporation gave millions _after_ Trump had already won. If your criticism is that, then that does not apply to the people signing.
Some form of US AI lab nationalization is possible, but it hasn't happened yet. We'll see. Nationalization can take different forms, not to mention various arrangements well short of it.
I interpret the comment above as a normative claim (what should happen). It implies the nationalization threat forces the decision by the AI labs. No. I will grant it influences, in the sense that AI labs have to account for it.