If nations chose to restrict that, such detection would merit a military response. Like Iran's centrifuges.
But if you want to talk about "actionable" here are three potential actions a country could take and the confidence level they need for such actions:
- A country looking for targets to bomb doesn't need much confidence. Even if they hit a weather prediction data center, it's going to hurt them.
- A country looking to arrest or otherwise sanction citizens needs just enough confidence to obtain a warrant (so "probably") and they can gather concrete evidence on the ground.
- A country looking to insert a mole probably doesn't need much evidence either. Even if they land in another type of data center, the mole is probably useful.
For most use cases, being correct more than half the time is plenty.
1. I was just granting the GPs point to make the broader point that, for the purposes of this original discussion about these "safety declarations", this is immaterial. These safety declarations are completely unenforceable even if you could detect that someone was training AI.
2. Now, to your point about moving the goalposts, even though I say "if you could detect that someone was training AI", I don't actually even think that is possible. There are far too many normal uses of data centers to determine if one particular use is "training an AI" vs. some other data intensive use. I mean, there have long been supercomputer centers that do stuff like weather analysis and prediction, drug discovery analysis, astronomy tools, etc. that all look pretty indistinguishable from "training an AI" from the outside.