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It's an interesting assumption. The idea behind this with nukes was that we'd like to nuke Germany before they could nuke us. Even after we defeated Germany, we nuked Japan even though they had no possibility of getting their own nukes.

The nuclear 'race' was based on the premise that the winner could use it to destroy all other racers (a faulty assumption, see the USSR among others). I will charitably assume Anthropic does not intend to literally destroy anyone and merely wants to become an AGI monopoly. But if AGI is so powerful, any monopoly would not be stable since the incentives for entry into the market are massive. Why would China stop developing AGI just because Anthropic has it?

by estearum2 hours ago|

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Do you believe the current situation is more akin to the race to the first nukes, where no one could know for sure the other competitors were even racing...

or is it more similar to the Cold War, where there were obviously competitors engaged in the race?

And yes, agreed the equilibrium dynamics for AGI are very different (and far harder to predict) than nukes. That sounds like a good reason to be sure we get there first since presumably any potential advantage wouldn't go to the second or third runner-ups

by sobellian1 hours ago|

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I can't really say I see a similarity to either the Manhattan Project or the Cold War. I don't see how one could apply either massive retaliation or MAD. These are private companies, they are not vested with the necessary authority to destroy anything. Even if they had it, they couldn't. You can't destroy China, they have 1.4B people, nukes, and a large part of the world's manufacturing. So multiple organizations want to do something first, that could be anything from nukes to railroads to lining up for communion wafers.

by estearum1 hours ago|

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You think "arms race" is a dynamic that only applies to literal arms?

"Ability to literally destroy the other entity" is not a necessary or even typical feature of arms races.

by sobellian1 hours ago|

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Well it's difficult to argue against something that was never specifically stated. If someone is able to state specifically how this is an arms race in any other way than that it's a race at all then I'm happy to have that conversation.

by estearum1 hours ago|

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"Arms race" is the term used colloquially to describe the dynamic that emerges in "winner-take-all" markets.

It seems that the frontier labs believe they're participants in a winner-take-all market. Therefore they're in "an arms race."

Winner-take-all markets do not require that the winner literally destroys the losers, but only that the winner enjoys disproportionate returns compared to their actual superiority.

Whether or not this is actually true is TBD, but I think you're naive to think the frontier labs do not believe this to be true.

by sobellian52 minutes ago|

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I don't know why you think I'm taking anything literally, cf. my first comment. I understand what a metaphorical arms race is. I don't think that Anthropic can forestall others' AI development by getting there first. It can't be literal destruction. It can't be economic destruction (some actors interested in it aren't motivated by money). What's left? I'm all ears.

As far as naivete, wouldn't it be more naive to take their EA claims at face value, rather than the more realistic assumption that they like money?

by estearum39 minutes ago|

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> These are private companies, they are not vested with the necessary authority to destroy anything

You're pretty explicitly saying that dominating the competition is not the type of "destruction" necessary to qualify as an arms race.

> As far as naivete, wouldn't it be more naive to take their EA claims at face value, rather than the more realistic assumption that they like money?

Huh? Greed is – quite obviously – the major driving force behind the arms race. That is not a mitigation whatsoever.

by sobellian37 minutes ago|

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> I will charitably assume Anthropic does not intend to literally destroy anyone and merely wants to become an AGI monopoly.

by zozbot23423 minutes ago|

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Creative destruction is absolutely a thing in the market, but the way things are going it seems more likely that open source models will just destroy everything else as far as most users are concerned. The big proprietary labs will be effectively left with Fable, GPT-Pro and Gemini Deep Research - stuff that by all indications needs very large scale compute to even feasibly run. We'll probably find out that each has its own strengths, weaknesses and viable niches, so there's no reason to expect any of those models to utterly destroy the others. They can all survive as specialty services.

by estearum13 minutes ago|

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Sure, but:

> Whether or not this is actually true is TBD, but I think you're naive to think the frontier labs do not believe this to be true.