Not in the way you seem to be thinking, no. Nuclear weapons can be banned because they are prohibitively expensive to research and build. You can't reliably hide a nuclear program.
In contrast, rewind to the early 1800s and there is zero hope of a ban on the R&D of small arms being effective in the long run. The only thing it might maybe ensure is that no legitimate actors that fall under your jurisdiction are involved in it.
Basically I think that current trends point to an eventual situation where world changing research doesn't require anything more than consumer level compute. Pandora's box has already been opened.
> We don't have pocket nukes
Bit of a tangent but we do, actually. At least depending on if you consider an artillery shell to be pocket sized. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_artillery
This one is a bit long to fit in a pocket but you could certainly sling it over your back. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W45_(nuclear_warhead)
> Not in the way you seem to be thinking, no. Nuclear weapons can be banned because they are prohibitively expensive to research and build. You can't reliably hide a nuclear program.
Isn't that true of AI as well? Data centers are very big and very expensive.
> Bit of a tangent but we do, actually
Sure but not like the movies, these don't destroy cities. But the metaphor isn't accurate anyway: nukes don't get worse. The actual idea here is preventing the frontier of AI from advancing.
You don't need a datacenter to train a 30B model. Further, the rapid trend of increasing efficiency and decreasing model size for a given level of capabilities means that what is possible to do without a datacenter will continue to increase. Presumably performance on the level of the current frontier of AI would be achieved in short order and the ceiling would only continue to advance from there. Ergo I expect such an approach to regulation would prove entirely self defeating.
Remember, as I mentioned earlier the human brain only consumes on the order of 20 watts and fits in a handbag. Would you have us destroy all chip fabs? Ban all biomedical and genetic research? How far are you imagining this butlerian jihad would go?