[hackerlight]

China can not win this race and I hate that this comment is going to be controversial among the circle of people that need to understand this the most. It is damn frightening that an authoritarian country is so close to number one in the race to the most powerful technology humanity has invented, and I resent people who push for open source AI for this reason alone. I don't want to live in a world where the first superintelligence is controlled by an entity that is threatened by the very idea of democracy.

[id00]

I agree with your point. However I also don't want to live in a world where the first superintelligence is controlled by an entities that:

- try to scan all my chat messages searching for CSAM

- have black sites across the world where anyone can dissappear without any justice

- can require me to unlock my phone and give it away

- ... and so on

The point I'm trying to make is that other big players in the race are crooked as well and i'm waiting for a great horror for AGI to be invented as no matter who gets it - we are all doomed

[insane_dreamer]

Agreed. The U.S. has a horrible history (as do many countries), and many things I dislike, but its current iteration is much, much better than China's totalitarianism and censorship.

[richrichie]

US is no angel and it cannot be the only one which wins the race. We have hard evidence of how monopoly power gets abused in the case of the US e.g. as the sole nuclear power, it used nukes on civilians.

We need every one to win this race to keep things on balance.

[hackerlight]

US has to win the race because while it's true that it's no angel, it isn't an authoritarian dictatorship and there isn't an equivalence in how bad the world will end up for you and me if the authoritarian side wins the race. Monopoly power will get abused the most by the least democratic actors, which is China. We need multiple actors within the US to win to balance power. We don't need or want China to be one of the winners. There is no upside for humanity in that outcome.

The US policymakers have figured this out with their chip export ban. Techies on the other hand, probably more than half the people here, are so naive and clueless about the reality of the moment we are in, that they support open sourcing this tech, the opposite of what we need to be doing to secure our future prosperity and freedom. Open source almost anything, just not this. It gives too much future power to authoritarians. That risk overwhelms the smaller risks that open sourcing is supposed to alleviate.