I'll play devil's advocate a little bit - I'm not sure it is losing its "independence" by not taking part in the race. It could very well be that it is gaining independence from tech and choosing a "second mover advantage" to decide how it gets deployed after seeing how it impacts everyone else. Let the US and China experiment on the bleeding edge (and their citizens feel the effect, both good and bad), and then be picky about how you use it.
I don't know if it is the right strategy but there's certainly a legitimate strategy in there.
The problem is recursive self improvement creating a very difficult gap and the fact that power, compute has a lag from when you invest and when data centers come up.
You also can't just spin up a research team out of nowhere.
These things are true, however:
1. The labs in the US and China don't seem to have any problem selling (or even giving) access to these models right now.
2. If some kind of take-off happens which makes that not true, my bet is all bets are off on what that outcome even looks like. What would the economic paradigm even be under a superintelligent AGI? Do you think "it" is going to listen when Trump says "you can't work with Europe"?
There's a whole bunch of grey in between the two, for example only having access to second rate models, but I'm not sure that particularly matters if the strategy is "second mover."
I mean, it might listen to him. We have no clue, which is the problem.
Sure, but my guess is for "true" super intelligence we won't be able to predict whether that is true or not until it happens. I'm not a doomer, but I also don't really think we can "align" people, much less a "super intelligent" AI.
Let’s autonomous Russian drones, and Europe is at mercy of two other empires, who capitalize on this opportunity.