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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 7, 2025

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They expect returns from that investment.

Probably, although investing in something does not necessarily mean each investor probabilistically expects returns from that specific investment. (If this does not make sense, I strongly recommend reading "Innovation – The New Conservatism?" by Peter Drucker.) Humorously, I seem to recall that OpenAI explicitly advised its investors that their goal might render monetary returns moot.

The definition of superintelligence is pretty straightforward - something qualitatively smarter than a human like how we're qualitatively smarter than a monkey or dog. Better than the best of us at every intellectual task of significance.

Now this I think is a decent definition. But it doesn't get you to godlike powers (plenty of people still get pwned by monkeys and dogs. And of course going by test scores the top-end AIs are already superintelligent relative to large portions of the population.) There's no reason to think doing well on a test will allow you to make weapons with physics unknown to humanity as you've suggested, any more than Einstein was able to.

The general trend is not specialized intelligences like the carrier-strike UAV that the USN made into a tanker and then pointlessly scrapped, the trend is big general entities like Gemini 2.5 or Claude 3.7 that can execute various complex operations in all kinds of modalities.

I don't think this is true. There are a lot of specialized AI products or "wrappers" out there, with specific tweaks for people like lawyers, researchers, government affairs analysts and communications/PR types, not to mention specialized video generation models. (OpenAI alone lists seven models on their website, six of which are GPT models and one of which is a specialized video generation model.)

My non-exhaustive experience reading real-life evaluations suggests that the general models do not necessarily cut it in these specialized fields, and that the specialized models exist and likely will continue to exist for a reason (even if that reason is only "user friendliness" although as I understand it currently the specialized products have capabilities that general models do not.)

For the reasons I have laid out (as well as regulatory ones), military and civilian applications already using AI (such a missile guidance systems, military and civilian autopilots, car safety features, household appliances, etc.etc.) are unlikely to switch in the near future to LLMs. (In fact I suspect there will probably never be a reason to switch in most of these cases, although they might end up being coded by LLMs, or attached to LLMs to produce a unified product that combines the coding and features of several AI.)

I'm arguing that superintelligences acting in the world must be taken seriously, that we can't afford to just laugh them off.

Do you think the guy suggesting we should retain the capability to nuke datacenters is arguing that we can afford to laugh them off, or nah?

The US regulatory system is no match for superintelligence or even the people who are making it, this is how I can tell you're not grappling with the issue. Musk is basically in the cabinet, he's one of the players in the game. Big tech can tell Trump 'Tariffs? Lol no' and their will is done. That's mere human levels of influence and money, nothing superhuman. The humble fent dealer wipes his ass with the US regulatory system daily as he distributes poison to the masses. A superintelligence (working alone or with the richest, most influential organizations around) has no fear of some bureaucrats, it would casually produce 50,000 pages on why it's super duper legal actually and deserves huge subsidies to Beat China.

I don't think you fully understand how the US regulatory system works. Merely producing large numbers of pages to sate its lust or cutting arguments to satisfy its reason does not mean it will give you what you want.

Now, it's quite possible that AI will skate past the eye of Sauron for very human reasons (the Big Tech pull in D.C. you allude to for instance).

Approaches like 'just don't plug it into the internet' or 'stick a nuke beneath the datacenter' are not going to cut it. Deepseek is probably going to open-source whatever they come up with and that's a good thing. I don't want OpenAI birthing a god in a world of mortals, I don't want mortals trying to chain up beings smarter than themselves and incurring their ire, I want balance of power competition in a world populated by demigods, spirits and powers.

I don't think these are mutually exclusive. (And anyone who knows anything about demigods, spirits and powers knows that for all their power and intelligence it's possible to outwit them, which makes them a pretty interesting comparator for AI here). I agree (as I think I mentioned) that it's good to have competing models. I would also prefer not to give them direct access to nuclear weapons. I think this is a reasonable position.