🤖 AI has risks. So does regulating it.

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The Essay

🤖 AI has risks. So does regulating it.

It’s not surprising given the current geopolitical climate that the emergence of large language models such as ChatGPT immediately prompted questions about China’s generative AI capabilities. That, especially as the performance of LLMs quickly led to speculation about their progression to artificial general intelligence. 

As former Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently wrote in Foreign Affairs:

Even more powerful than today’s artificial intelligence is a more comprehensive technology—for now, given current computing power, still hypothetical—called “artificial general intelligence,” or AGI. … The advent of AGI remains years, perhaps even decades, away, but whichever country develops the technology first will have a massive advantage, since it could then use AGI to develop ever more advanced versions of AGI, gaining an edge in all other domains of science and technology in the process. A breakthrough in this field could usher in an era of predominance not unlike the short period of nuclear superiority the United States enjoyed in the late 1940s.

Of course, there’s now some reason to think Schmidt was too pessimistic in his forecast. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei says his timeline to AI matching a "generally well educated human" is about two to three years. (The current Metaculus community forecast for when the first “weakly general AI system will be devised, tested, and publicly announced” is January 2027.)

Now imagine: What if the consensus appraisal of China’s AI abilities was that it was not two or three years behind but two or three years ahead?