alt Hacker News> You're making an assumption that's debatable, but let's just assume it's correct. The reality is that China won't be the only to achieve such. In the same way that the US put arguably the best minds in the world towards developing the atom bomb, and within a few years the Soviets had theirs as well.
I never said other countries won't gain access to the technology. The point is that the 1st country to achieve that leap will get to use it to gain advantages in literally every sector.
I get some people are hoping that AI research is for the benefit of all, and I do too, but that is wishful thinking.
> The point is that the 1st country to achieve that leap will get to use it to gain advantages in literally every sector.
That's still speculative. We have something of a basis for speculation with the way LLMs influenced software engineering, but it's not necessarily applicable to "literally every sector" of scientific progress. If their quantum leap is anything like vibe coding, then it will quickly become an unmanageable cesspit lacking accountability and grasping at notoriety. We have precious little to show for half a decade of LLM-generated code, nobody disrupted the FAANG incumbents by using an LLM to crack the digital secrets of the universe.
The safety angle played its card and lost. We've been generating trillions upon trillions of tokens, and nobody has raised the dead or made The Bomb with red mercury. Smarter AI clearly isn't a panacea.
> I get some people are hoping that AI research is for the benefit of all, and I do too, but that is wishful thinking.
You're way too lost in the plot. Technology can absolutely be used for ill, and no doubt AI has already contributed to reprehensible things. But it cannot turn lead into gold. It cannot reveal the face of God or compute The Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything. The ultimate threat of AI is the stuff it can already do - cosine similarity search on billions of discrete records, automated labeling with computer vision, multimodal analysis and corroboration pipelines. The hypothetical scenario where superintelligence is made is a thought-terminating cliche that is driving people into a zealous fervor.