Not a chance: if there was even a 1% chance of this being true you'd see something entirely different happening. If AI research self-reinforces, as Anthropic publishes (but doesn't actually believe, it can't), then it will win from all the economic activity on the planet. The major consequence of that is that money (as a source of labor, ie. to get people to do stuff for you, to get stuff for you) is now worthless.
Why? It is now easy to get a few motors to do that stuff for you. It is now easy to get whatever manufactured ... except for raw materials, and energy if you see that as separate.
Think about that again: if superintelligence exists the huge change is that money is now worthless and raw materials have all just turned more valuable than their weight in pure gold (assuming they're more useful than gold, which is all of them). Steel, just raw ingots, will increase in price BY A FACTOR ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND, minimum. At this point your dog can probably reason towards the investment opportunity, no?
You would buy farms, mines, mining rights, water, energy (and not for DCs, actual energy sources), rivers, raw materials ... that sort of thing. A superintelligence is not going to be exempt from the means of production. Raw materials are mostly monopolized in the current economic system, so this would in fact be absolutely critical to your success. And hoards of raw materials, anything, will be worth more than Gold (gold being pretty useless except for looking pretty and having a somewhat favorable electrical resistance, but not super great. When it comes to strength it is beaten by 2-day old chewing gum. So if economic activity is 100x-ing every raw material actually used for something will go into extreme shortage)
So no, sorry. Obviously this cannot be how Amodei, Altman, Google, Meta, and others are seeing things: they're going after money, not something else. So they are either stupid or they know 99%+ sure they do not have superintelligence. Because if they do let superintelligence loose, mining countries will have them by the balls and will squeeze. Hard. Yet the money all these people are collecting boatloads of will be useless. And yet, they want the money, not the raw materials! That tells you what they believe: that the money is more valuable than raw materials ... AND more valuable than superintelligence.
In other words: AI is a bubble, a hype, according to the management of the big AI firms. It's a way to get people to give them money, not an actual path to superintelligence. Either that, or these people are complete idiots.
Not really. You are assuming that ASI will just win irrespective of anything else, 2 seconds after it starts. How would it do that? By launching the nukes? And if it takes time, everyone else has time to catch up ... and raw materials will be the determining factor.
So that's not what happen. Yes, someone will be first, but the second will not be far behind.
Once you have ASI, raw material owners and the governments they're in will PICK the winner from the choices available. Just like they did in the 20th century.
To say nothing of the consequences of what is currently happening with Chinese models only 2 months behind frontier labs. Even if it's 8 months or 2 years or whatever. ASI will not build an insurmountable advantage in the world economy in 2 months, especially not if some raw materials players sabotage it (which seems likely in the extreme, and is simply what raw materials players are already doing, so they don't even have to realize what's happening and start doing it)
You are assuming that ASI won't just win, simply because you can't imagine it? Examples:
- Sophisticated cyberattacks to disable or quietly sabotage competing labs
- Undermining nuclear second-strike capability by locating submarines and infiltrating command-and-control networks
- Fast-replicating nanotechnology
- Superpersuasion (I am dubious on this)
etc., backed by global surveillance to preempt sabotage efforts. If you haven't read Superintelligence you should, all the leaders of the labs certainly have.
I just totally exclude that, because that would be a totally uncontrollable AI, which would be "huge meteor strikes the earth" type of scenario. Extinction level event stuff. If that happens, we're all dead, including Altman and Amodei, Google and Meta management.
So this level superintelligence also falls under the statement "if management believed that, this isn't what you'd see them do".
Plus your statement doesn't explain why they're after money.
You cannot control or align something 10x your intelligence. That would be like a dog controlling a human. For one thing, it won't even work after a short while because the dog's requests are going to be stupid. Except Altman and Amodei will be the dogs.
I'm with the people who really doubt alignment matters.
Besides, one thing keeps coming up in the open models: removing alignment makes them better, more interesting and more creative (difference for fiction, games, and ... well look at civitai is enormous).
And alignment also opens up an avenue to beat these models. And this will be a new level of moral dilemma: you can't judge, because the AI is too complex, too fast, too smart, ... and you cannot even react in time.
> ... they are after money because it allows them to scale and hopefully control AGI/ASI ...
Makes no sense for companies that are already making their own chips. If they truly believed they could figure it out FAST, they'd be buying sand (and it's not everywhere: apparently the purity is a big deal and not available in many places)
Why? It is now easy to get a few motors to do that stuff for you. It is now easy to get whatever manufactured ... except for raw materials, and energy if you see that as separate.
Think about that again: if superintelligence exists the huge change is that money is now worthless and raw materials have all just turned more valuable than their weight in pure gold (assuming they're more useful than gold, which is all of them). Steel, just raw ingots, will increase in price BY A FACTOR ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND, minimum. At this point your dog can probably reason towards the investment opportunity, no?
You would buy farms, mines, mining rights, water, energy (and not for DCs, actual energy sources), rivers, raw materials ... that sort of thing. A superintelligence is not going to be exempt from the means of production. Raw materials are mostly monopolized in the current economic system, so this would in fact be absolutely critical to your success. And hoards of raw materials, anything, will be worth more than Gold (gold being pretty useless except for looking pretty and having a somewhat favorable electrical resistance, but not super great. When it comes to strength it is beaten by 2-day old chewing gum. So if economic activity is 100x-ing every raw material actually used for something will go into extreme shortage)
So no, sorry. Obviously this cannot be how Amodei, Altman, Google, Meta, and others are seeing things: they're going after money, not something else. So they are either stupid or they know 99%+ sure they do not have superintelligence. Because if they do let superintelligence loose, mining countries will have them by the balls and will squeeze. Hard. Yet the money all these people are collecting boatloads of will be useless. And yet, they want the money, not the raw materials! That tells you what they believe: that the money is more valuable than raw materials ... AND more valuable than superintelligence.
In other words: AI is a bubble, a hype, according to the management of the big AI firms. It's a way to get people to give them money, not an actual path to superintelligence. Either that, or these people are complete idiots.