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Comment by sznio | Hacker News Reader

>Fantasizing about alternative realities where all the leaders of the world unite and halt technology development without any of them secretly defecting and developing it further isn’t very useful to discuss. These things aren’t going to happen.

it has kinda worked for nuclear weapons

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"We" (Israel, probably with US assistance) assassinate "rogue" (outside of existing nuclear powers) nuclear scientists (e.g. from Iran). So to take this analogy to its conclusion you have to accept that part of the pact would be assassinating people for doing computer science research or building computer systems that will be used for AI.

In the nuclear case multiple powers raced to develop it as fast as possible and as much as possible.

That’s the inverse of what I said.

Nuclear weapons come with the immense benefit that purifying uranium is so challenging, expensive, and difficult to hide that we don't even bother to protect the information on how to build a nuke. They also have a second benefit of being impossible to test without the whole world knowing you did.

AI has no such hurdles.

No, the AI compute supply chain is actually quite similar to the nuclear supply chain. Building chips capable of training or large-scale inference is extraordinarily complex, expensive, has a large footprint, and has a few chokepoints (rare earths mining, HBM manufacturing, and ultraviolet lithography, where there is literally one company in the world capable of building the relevant outputs) where we in fact already have governance mechanisms for things like export controls.

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