alt Hacker NewsU.S. policymakers believe that even if the gap is small—like six months to a year—whoever reaches AGI first (whatever that means) could gain such an overwhelming advantage over their perceived adversary that it would effectively kneecap them. (You can look at the kinds of things they mention—cyber, WMDs—to get a sense of what they mean.) Jensen Huang disagrees and has said AI is a marathon.
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I feel like if you showed current frontier models to someone 10 years ago, they'd probably call it AGI. Does AGI have a clear definition or is it just a pair of goalposts on wheels?
This sounds like someone has swallowed too many sci-fi novels. Both the US and China can already nuke each other, they don't need AGI to that. The reason they don't is because it's war is bad for everyone involved.
> Jensen Huang disagrees and has said AI is a marathon.
Of course he'd say that; he wants to keep his shovels flying off the shelves.
All the AGI (which is a misnomer, ASI is preferred) talk is about the moment of singularity, which is where the growth at the third derivative is increasing, so the gap (in the absolute) between first place and others, even if it's one month, will be ever increasing as time progresses. I also have a hard time believing this narrative because limiting factors prevail such as compute and energy. These constraints will take many many years to overcome.
I don't forsee politicians in either country handing over their power to AIs, ever. Unless nukes are dropped, "the other side" will catch up.
Reaching AGI would come with so many ethical issues, it feels so absurd that actual adults seem to actually believe it’s something that must be chased as fast as possible
It’s kind of true but also kind of silly.
True in that frontier models do have the capability to outperform all other models, but silly because AGI self improvement is itself an iterative process that takes a lot of compute.
So you can imagine a world where all the frontier labs achieve AGI but in order to keep their AGI ahead of other AGIs they have to use more and more compute until all the compute is going to self improvement and there is nothing left for other tasks.
That is just a silly scenario so I think when AGI is around we will still have bottlenecks that force it to grow at a moderate rate instead of asymptomatically.
AGI first mover advantage implies that there is no such bottlenecks.
> Jensen Huang disagrees and has said AI is a marathon.
We have a saying for that in Italy: "Oste, com'e' il vino?", "Innkeeper, how's the wine?", meaning you should take with a grain of salt assertions that clearly benefit whoever's making them.
> U.S. policymakers believe that even if the gap is small—like six months to a year—whoever reaches AGI first [...]
As far as I can tell, the Trump admin has never acknowledged AGI being a goal of theirs. In fact, the admin's "AI advisor" Sriram Krishnan has specifically pushed back on AGI when he called it "a distraction, harmful and now effectively proven wrong."
The ai.gov website says this:
> The United States is in a race to achieve global dominance in artificial intelligence. Whoever has the largest AI ecosystem will set the global standards and reap broad economic and security benefits. Under President Trump, our Nation will win, ushering in a new Golden Age of innovation, human flourishing, and technological achievement for the American people. America’s AI Action Plan has three policy pillars – Accelerating Innovation, Building AI Infrastructure, and Leading International Diplomacy and Security.
Are you sure you're not confusing US policymakers with Silicon Valley CEOs? I'm sure Amodei and Altman wish they could have Claude draft up new policy and EO it into existence, but we're not quite there yet.
> U.S. policymakers believe that even if the gap is small—like six months to a year—whoever reaches AGI first...
From past experience, AGI was never seriously discussed in these kinds of conversations beyond thought experiments, and was basically humoring SBF, Daniela Amodei, and the other EA types (some deep believers, but some who I felt were cynically using it as a way to preempt competition back when OpenAI and Google were the behemoths).
The big worry is applications of AI in C4ISR, OffSec, loitering munitions, Disinfo/social media botting (notice the recent shift towards identification on social media ;)), and other sorts of DefenseTech adjacent usecases.
The second worry is that an AI race turns into an infra buildout race, and HPC is extremely dual use, especially in the simulations space because of the NPT, the CTBT, and the PTBT.
The AGI-pilled people aren't the ones to worry about - it's the people who understand the limits of models and how to integrate with cyberphysical applications.
They'd have to use the gap though to actually kneecap them in that time, or else it is just shoveling money into the fire.
The missile gap for example after all was settled and done, didn't matter at all because not a single missile was ever fired off. All that money, resources, talent, secrecy, lives lost maintaining that secrecy, lives dedicated to furthering that technology and secrecy, it just has not paid off at all for anything at all when you think about it. Maybe you can argue side efforts like nuclear reactor were great or space cargo deployment, but you know you could have just dug into that stuff directly without having to collect it from the drippings of the wmd effort.