[arcanus]

I do not find her critique of argument #2 compelling [1]. Monetization of AI is key to economic growth. She's focused on the democratic aspects of AI, which frankly aren't pertinent. The real "race" in AI is between economic and financial forces, with huge infrastructure investments requiring a massive return on investment to justify the expense. From this perspective, increasing the customer base and revenue of the company is the objective. Without this success, investment in AI will drop, and with it, company valuations.

The essay attempted to mitigate this by noting OAI is nominally a non-profit. But it's clear the actions of the leadership are firmly aligned with traditional capitalism. That's perhaps the only interesting subtly of the issue, but the essay missed this entirely. The omission could not have been intentional, because it provides a complete motivation for item #2.

[1] #2 is 'The US is a democracy and China isn’t, so anything that helps the US “win” the AI “race” is good for democracy.'

[gsf_emergency]

>anything that helps the US “win”

That is, "the ends justifies the means"? Yep, seems like we are already at war. What happened to the project of adapting nonzero sum games to reality??

[bgwalter]

The U.S. may be a nominal democracy, but the governed have no influence over the oligarchy. For example, they will not be able to stop "AI" even though large corporations steal their output and try to make their jobs obsolete or more boring.

Real improvements are achieved in the real world, and building more houses or high speed trains does not require "AI". "AI" will just ruin the last remaining attractive jobs, and China can win that race if they want to, which isn't clear yet at all. They might be more prudent and let the West reduce its collective IQ by taking instructions from computers hosted by mega corporations.