alt Hacker News> How do you know that the Chinese aren’t exactly as uneasy about rapidly advancing AI capability
I don't "know", I'm interpreting the world based on the knowledge I have and the information available to me.
China has never been one to care much about things like ethics or safety. While the west worries about climate change, China burns more coal than ever before. While the west balks at things like gene editing, the chinese press on with human enhancing research.
So I have no reason to believe they share in Anthropic's constant fearmongering over AI capabilities.
> Nobody wins from the race.
We win. I'm really looking forward to the day the chinese finally start manufacturing memory and GPUs. We desperately need more competition in this area to collapse hardware prices and make local AI models viable.
The optimal state of the world is one where all the billionaires are out there pouring their entire fortunes into training ever more godlike AIs for everyone else to use at ever cheaper prices. They can never be allowed to "win", ever, because if they do the competition ends and it turns into technofeudalism. Let them exhaust their fortunes on AI training then leak the weights so everyone can use them.
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And China scaled up solar production to the point that it's now truly practical.
If you look at energy consumption per capita and adjust for global production, you will see that the Chinese are almost at the very top.
It is of course given that in raw numbers the kitchen and biller-room will consume more energy in the household, but looking at raw numbers is shallow.
China does have its own set of cares, they may be different than ours but they still exist. If some open Chinese model goes nuts and posts Winnie the Pooh memes everywhere in China you should expect said models to get yanked off the market, and said creators might end up with a rope around their neck.
> While the west worries about climate change, China burns more coal than ever before.
I'd wager the majority of the visitors of this site are smart enough to not fall for this. What are you doing?
It’s not fear mongering though, is it? These models do have the cyber offensive capabilities claimed. Could Mythos walk someone through gain of function experiments on some virus? I’m pretty sure it could. We’re more protected by limited access to lab equipment and reagents than by difficulty.
The sad truth is that a lot of people are not going to believe it until something happens and people die. Successfully preventing that from happening will be seen as evidence that the prevention wasn’t needed.
> I'm really looking forward to the day the chinese finally start manufacturing memory and GPUs. We desperately need more competition in this area to collapse hardware prices and make local AI models viable.
Yeah and if the quality of that memory is like Chinese steel (which is called "chinesium" for a reason), eventually all we'll get is enshittification. Premium binned memory or ECC is for the rich and the rich only, and the rest of us has to pray their memory won't bitflip while something important is stored there.
> China has never been one to care much about things like ethics or safety. While the west worries about climate change, China burns more coal than ever before.
China uses more energy than ever before, but out of big systems, they are easily in the lead when it comes to solar generation: they have higher production per capita than US, and have produced around 4x as much TWh than US in the second: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_by_country
It is simply a huge country of 1.1B people that's developing fast, which means that they need all the energy they can get.
Basically, their energy needs per capita are still lower than US, yet they produce more renewables — that's a counterargument to your point about them not caring.