An arms race doesn’t imply one side winning, it’s not a race with an end goal, it’s a race to keep pace or retake the lead position which can oscillate between the parties involved indefinitely. The other option is to agree to make no further progress or to disarm.
No it wasn't. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tube_Alloys
Post WW2 the USA (for a bunch of quite interesting reasons) excluded the British. But, of course, the British had acquired a lot of knowledge from the program and were able to develop their own bomb.
Point being humans make theses decisions. It's not an inevitability.
The military mostly only developed more powerful nukes because early delivery and guidance systems were so inaccurate that they needed a large blast radius to hit anything. Once enabling technologies improved, R&D shifted from power to accuracy.
I don't think this is true. Distillation helps, but Chinese researchers today are very capable on their own.
In a geopolitical sense OpenAI and Anthropic are effectively the same entity, the entity they both serve and bow to: the USA.
Given the adversarial stance the USA has taken towards almost the entire world, it is a guarantee that China will not step on the brakes, whatever the USA decides to do.
And if one of the parties can put a stop to the race like that at any time, is it really an arms race? The current balance between the US and China when it comes to AI strikes me as much more lopsided than the balance between the US and the USSR when it came to nuclear weapons.
Only if you trust the other party (which very clearly doesn't hold in this case) or monitoring the break can be done independently and reliably (it can't), and you expect the gap to narrow rather than widen during a pause (this is probably the case, with China expected to catch up).
> And if one of the parties can put a stop to the race like that at any time, is it really an arms race?
It is. It's a Prisoner's Dilemma: if the parties cooperate the best outcome is reached, but betrayal of either party still gains an advantage for either party from their perspective. Betrayal both ways just means both parties are equally fucked.
For nuclear weapons it has become quite clear that even for small players, being in the race and having at least a few nukes is far more rational than having none. Ukraine found out the hard way that giving them up in exchange for promises of good behavior just sets you up for getting stabbed in the back.
> The current balance between the US and China when it comes to AI strikes me as much more lopsided than the balance between the US and the USSR when it came to nuclear weapons.
I think people really underestimate the Chinese here. A lot of work in AI research, including in the USA, has been done by people with Chinese ancestry or even nationality. The Chinese education system definitely seems much better than the American one and there is also just a far larger number of Chinese graduates/researchers.
Add to that the stable political climate, state friendliness towards AI R&D, and a requirement to be creative in utilizing computing power rather than relying on brute force/numbers; Further revolutionary fundamental advances may very well originate there rather than in the USA.
I've heard a different perspective on this: Nuclear weapons need maintaining, and even maintaining them was probably beyond Ukraine's capability. Qaddafi gave up nuclear weapons after determining that they were just too expensive to be worth it; Iran damaged its economy to the tune of trillions of dollars trying to get nuclear weapons and so far failed; NK managed to get them but impoverished their nation to do it.