The Race

Every now and then I read a post which simplifies the terms which fly around AI. Dror Poleg lists down 50 words that explain AI and talks about the race between US and China.

China and the US take different approaches to the race to develop powerful AI. Each approach reflects different priorities and current capabilities. 

The American bet is on chokepoints — the narrow places in the chip supply chain where one company or country is irreplaceable. One Dutch firm, ASML, makes every EUV lithography machine capable of printing the most advanced GPU chips. One Taiwanese firm, TSMC, fabricates the overwhelming majority of them. One American firm, Nvidia, designs the GPUs everyone wants. Since October 2022, U.S. export controls have tried to hold China several years behind the frontier by blocking its access to these narrows — the machines, the chips, even specific memory. When the good is cheap to copy, control the means of production instead.

The Chinese bet is on abundance and diffusion. Publish more research, release open weights (DeepSeek, Qwen, Kimi and their siblings are now the default free models for much of the world), and build electricity like it’s going out of style. China already publishes roughly a third of the world’s AI research papers — quantity, not necessarily quality — and its share of the most-cited work has passed America’s too. And in Epoch AI’s tally of notable models, China’s share of frontier training compute reached about 40% this year, against roughly 55% for the United States: behind, but no longer a different league.

[…]

Meanwhile, China and the US are adversaries, the AI models themselves pose a threat to both: These models can hack, destabilize, and flood the world with disinformation. They can empower subversive groups, develop new viruses (and vaccines), and turn consumer devices into powerful weapons. 

Why can’t China and the US simply slow down AI development and agree on more responsible progress? Because the AI race has the structure of the oldest puzzle in game theory. In a prisoner’s dilemma, two players each choose between cooperating and defecting; defecting is the rational move for each no matter what the other does, so both defect and both end up worse off than if they had cooperated.

If China restrains and America races, America wins the century, and vice versa; if both race, both spend trillions and accept whatever risks come with moving fast. Each capital, reasoning correctly, races. Rationalists have a name for the god of such traps — Moloch, borrowed from an Allen Ginsberg poem, the personification of coordination failure: everyone sacrifices what they value to a competition nobody can exit.