? It absolutely is a race. Whether thats a positive thing or not is debatable but every lab is definitely in a race. What prize do you win? Imagine a world where only one country has AGI/ASI. Or a world where Europe only gets access to frontier models 6 months later. Far from ideal.
> What prize do you win? Imagine a world where only one country has AGI/ASI.
"Winning the race" doesn't give you that in any meaningful capacity. It gives you, at the absolute most, a temporary window where that's the case. See: nuclear weapons.
Citing nuclear weapons isn't the flex you think it is. There are only 9 countries that have nuclear weapons and they absolutely flex this power over non-nuclear powers (see Ukraine, Germany, SE Asia etc..)
Europe already has an innovation problem that's already causing structural economic instabilities which Germany has been struggling (and lately failing) to prop up.
As much as it pains me to say this, AI is already a tech revolution and it seems like Europe is just ignoring it. There's more innovation in 3 blocks in downtown San Francisco than the entire continent of Europe.
> There are only 9 countries that have nuclear weapons
QED being first didn't grant exclusivity.
The premise wasn't that AGI isn't useful. There are actually layers to the metaphor where first-mover advantage of AGI is even less meaningful than it was for nuclear weapons, but I leave those as an exercise to the reader to discover.
Lots of tech money is demonstrably wrong, at least in the general case. Microsoft's whole business model is to be the second mover. Patents exist because first mover advantage alone isn't enough to hold onto a win.
If AI is different, the onus is on AI folk to explain why, not the reverse.
The frontier labs are racing as hard as they can right now because they know as well as anyone else that they're at best 6 months, probably closer to 3 months, ahead of the generic commodity AI market. The majority of the tech money currently boosting them is a bet that either they can stay that far ahead without tripping, or that a moat can be engineered. It's not at all clear that it can - or, if it can, that it will before the money runs out.
> You should at least try to explain your contrarian position
FWIW I explained it fully and provided the argument, along with explicit grounding examples. Can you tell me what exactly you don't understand?
To quote your other post:
> This is the weakest part of the argument. Absolutely no reason to believe the second inventor will be 10x faster.
Nor is there any reason to believe that it will work at any usable speed. An LLM capable of AGI running at 0.000001tok/s isn't a very good head start. Nor is it a good moat if it can't actually realize anything material fast enough. Lord knows America has labor problems.
I'm demonstrating the context is a lot more complicated than "be first". There are innumerable specific examples. They're not guaranteed to happen, that's not the point being made.
Also "no reason" is curious when it's the explicit pattern this exact industry has exhibited. Chinese models lag a few months, and come in swinging with an order of magnitude more efficiency. Does it apply? Who can say. It's certainly on the table. Pretending like it's any more ridiculous than AGI itself is irrational.
> Does this ever happen? Even in traditional manufacturing, the second “inventor” starts behind and has to improve their own process to surpass the first.
To use the industry itself once again: Japan was the first to deep learning. Performance issues prevented them from capitalizing on it. Now they're barely even a player on the field. Interestingly and adjacent to the industry, Japan was second to symbolic AI, and the FGCS was lightyears ahead of America's crufty Lisp ecosystem. For a more modern example, Google was the first to transformers. Much of this revolution is thanks to them. A shame that Gemini is third-rate at best.
It's not unique to this industry. That second inventor more often than not does a better job than the original one. It's a pretty common pattern. Otherwise, we wouldn't need patents.
My "contrarian position" is anything but. There is nothing new under the sun. You don't just need to be first, you need to maintain exclusivity.
A reductive equation, economics isn't thermodynamics. Money is fictional and value is subjective and unstable. Within this context, being first to AGI means nothing if the second invention of it comes 2 months later and works an order of magnitude faster than what the first iteration had self-improved to at that point in time. First mover advantage isn't decisive, you have to actually be able to capitalize on it in a robust way.
This is the weakest part of the argument. Absolutely no reason to believe the second inventor will be 10x faster.
Does this ever happen? Even in traditional manufacturing, the second “inventor” starts behind and has to improve their own process to surpass the first.
This presupposes AGI or ASI are a real, reachable thing. My read is they might be, but not as LLMs. Until there's a fundamental rearchitecture, I'm AGI-agnostic and given that view, it doesn't seem rational to bet the house on it.
> Imagine a world where only one country has AGI/ASI.
You've fallen for the hype. The only way these AI companies can justify their bullshit worth and burn of capital is by promising a magical AGI. It's just marketing and it is still unclear if LLM's will ever be profitable.
If they won't - then EU is doing the right thing laying low.
> Or a world where Europe only gets access to frontier models 6 months later.
> If they won't - then EU is doing the right thing laying low.
Exactly. People seem to forget that US is burning money at an accelerating rate without any promise of returns. This is a high risk situation. Time will tell.
True, but that isn't EU/US/China, it's OpenAI/Anthropic/Grok/ …/DeepMind (based in UK)/… DeepSeek
With a lot of Chinese nationals in American companies, and an American corporation owning DeepMind, and a lot of people very upset with all of them at the same time, this is very messy.
The non-doom scenarios include "utopia for all", and "power flows to investors, not citizens of whichever nation the winning model's corp. was registered in".
Independently, "oh look all the investors went bankrupt" can happen in both "doom" and "normal technology" timelines.
Well, you get hundreds of billions in debt, and then you get open weight models distilling your proprietary models.
? It absolutely is a race. Whether thats a positive thing or not is debatable but every lab is definitely in a race. What prize do you win? Imagine a world where only one country has AGI/ASI. Or a world where Europe only gets access to frontier models 6 months later. Far from ideal.
> What prize do you win? Imagine a world where only one country has AGI/ASI.
"Winning the race" doesn't give you that in any meaningful capacity. It gives you, at the absolute most, a temporary window where that's the case. See: nuclear weapons.
Citing nuclear weapons isn't the flex you think it is. There are only 9 countries that have nuclear weapons and they absolutely flex this power over non-nuclear powers (see Ukraine, Germany, SE Asia etc..)
Europe already has an innovation problem that's already causing structural economic instabilities which Germany has been struggling (and lately failing) to prop up.
As much as it pains me to say this, AI is already a tech revolution and it seems like Europe is just ignoring it. There's more innovation in 3 blocks in downtown San Francisco than the entire continent of Europe.
> There are only 9 countries that have nuclear weapons
QED being first didn't grant exclusivity.
The premise wasn't that AGI isn't useful. There are actually layers to the metaphor where first-mover advantage of AGI is even less meaningful than it was for nuclear weapons, but I leave those as an exercise to the reader to discover.
Nobody argued exclusivity. But there have been clear advantages to having nukes first.
> Nobody argued exclusivity.
And I quote:
> Imagine a world where only one country has AGI/ASI.
> first-mover advantage of AGI is even less meaningful
This is your opinion. Lots of tech money appears to disagree.
You should at least try to explain your contrarian position, or cite your favorite source that makes an argument that you believe.
Lots of tech money is demonstrably wrong, at least in the general case. Microsoft's whole business model is to be the second mover. Patents exist because first mover advantage alone isn't enough to hold onto a win.
If AI is different, the onus is on AI folk to explain why, not the reverse.
The frontier labs are racing as hard as they can right now because they know as well as anyone else that they're at best 6 months, probably closer to 3 months, ahead of the generic commodity AI market. The majority of the tech money currently boosting them is a bet that either they can stay that far ahead without tripping, or that a moat can be engineered. It's not at all clear that it can - or, if it can, that it will before the money runs out.
> You should at least try to explain your contrarian position
FWIW I explained it fully and provided the argument, along with explicit grounding examples. Can you tell me what exactly you don't understand?
To quote your other post:
> This is the weakest part of the argument. Absolutely no reason to believe the second inventor will be 10x faster.
Nor is there any reason to believe that it will work at any usable speed. An LLM capable of AGI running at 0.000001tok/s isn't a very good head start. Nor is it a good moat if it can't actually realize anything material fast enough. Lord knows America has labor problems.
I'm demonstrating the context is a lot more complicated than "be first". There are innumerable specific examples. They're not guaranteed to happen, that's not the point being made.
Also "no reason" is curious when it's the explicit pattern this exact industry has exhibited. Chinese models lag a few months, and come in swinging with an order of magnitude more efficiency. Does it apply? Who can say. It's certainly on the table. Pretending like it's any more ridiculous than AGI itself is irrational.
> Does this ever happen? Even in traditional manufacturing, the second “inventor” starts behind and has to improve their own process to surpass the first.
To use the industry itself once again: Japan was the first to deep learning. Performance issues prevented them from capitalizing on it. Now they're barely even a player on the field. Interestingly and adjacent to the industry, Japan was second to symbolic AI, and the FGCS was lightyears ahead of America's crufty Lisp ecosystem. For a more modern example, Google was the first to transformers. Much of this revolution is thanks to them. A shame that Gemini is third-rate at best.
It's not unique to this industry. That second inventor more often than not does a better job than the original one. It's a pretty common pattern. Otherwise, we wouldn't need patents.
My "contrarian position" is anything but. There is nothing new under the sun. You don't just need to be first, you need to maintain exclusivity.
As if time isn't money? Everything is temporary... Getting somewhere first has immense value.
A reductive equation, economics isn't thermodynamics. Money is fictional and value is subjective and unstable. Within this context, being first to AGI means nothing if the second invention of it comes 2 months later and works an order of magnitude faster than what the first iteration had self-improved to at that point in time. First mover advantage isn't decisive, you have to actually be able to capitalize on it in a robust way.
> works an order of magnitude faster
This is the weakest part of the argument. Absolutely no reason to believe the second inventor will be 10x faster.
Does this ever happen? Even in traditional manufacturing, the second “inventor” starts behind and has to improve their own process to surpass the first.
[dead]
Russia invaded Ukraine specifically because they have nukes. Everyone is afraid to fight back.
This presupposes AGI or ASI are a real, reachable thing. My read is they might be, but not as LLMs. Until there's a fundamental rearchitecture, I'm AGI-agnostic and given that view, it doesn't seem rational to bet the house on it.
We'll see.
> Imagine a world where only one country has AGI/ASI.
You've fallen for the hype. The only way these AI companies can justify their bullshit worth and burn of capital is by promising a magical AGI. It's just marketing and it is still unclear if LLM's will ever be profitable.
If they won't - then EU is doing the right thing laying low.
> Or a world where Europe only gets access to frontier models 6 months later.
What a calamity!
> If they won't - then EU is doing the right thing laying low.
Exactly. People seem to forget that US is burning money at an accelerating rate without any promise of returns. This is a high risk situation. Time will tell.
> Imagine a world where only one country has AGI/ASI
My own bet is that this won't happen with the current race, but that's another discussion.
Anyways, bit of a doomer take but if I imagine a world with AGI/ASI, countries don't mean shit anymore. Humans are not the top dog anymore.
> Imagine a world where only one country has AGI/ASI
Who says the LLM race ends at an AGI/ASI finish line in the first place ?
How about "being able to align ASI somewhat to your values"?
True, but that isn't EU/US/China, it's OpenAI/Anthropic/Grok/ …/DeepMind (based in UK)/… DeepSeek
With a lot of Chinese nationals in American companies, and an American corporation owning DeepMind, and a lot of people very upset with all of them at the same time, this is very messy.
A race to the bottom.
The only prize is control of the light cone.
It's red queen. You stay alive by winning, you lose everything by losing.
Not sure you get either outcome in either case.
Race dynamics increases p(doom) for everyone.
The non-doom scenarios include "utopia for all", and "power flows to investors, not citizens of whichever nation the winning model's corp. was registered in".
Independently, "oh look all the investors went bankrupt" can happen in both "doom" and "normal technology" timelines.
Unless you manage to build a god, and keep it under control... okay, we're all going to lose