I think,

• People were wrong about Chinese AI being too far behind to matter.
• People were surprised that Chinese AI turned out to be open source rather than secretive-Manhattan-project-ish.

But

• The claim that it's ineffective getting the West to slow down or pause AI because China won't follow, is still your own theory.

I gave you a strong upvote because I strongly agree with the direction of your post and I think it's under-discussed.

But I wish you make it clearer that only the first two points are observed realities that people should adjust their beliefs to. The third point is your own belief, which may be wrong.

PS: Please don't say "This is literally cope" to people. That sounds like an X/Twitter comment. People on LessWrong avoid talking like that.

Please, before you criticize anyone, ask an AI to help translate your criticism into LessWrong flavoured corporate-speak. /s

I don't think it's fair to say I made a bad prediction here. 

Here's the full context of my quote: "The report clocks in at a cool 793 pages with 344 endnotes. Despite this length, there are only a handful of mentions of AGI, and all of them are in the sections recommending that the US race to build it. 

In other words, there is no evidence in the report to support Helberg’s claim that "China is racing towards AGI.” 

Nonetheless, his quote goes unchallenged into the 300-word Reuters story, which will be read far more than the 800-page document. It has the added gravitas of coming from one of the commissioners behind such a gargantuan report. 

I’m not asserting that China is definitively NOT rushing to build AGI. But if there were solid evidence behind Helberg’s claim, why didn’t it make it into the report?"

Here's my tweet mentioning Gwern's comment. It's not clear that DeepSeek falsifies what Gwern said here: 

1. the scientific culture of China is 'mafia' like (Hsu's term, not mine) and focused on legible easily-cited incremental research, and is against making any daring research leaps or controversial breakthroughs...

   but is capable of extremely high quality world-class followup and large scientific investments given a clear objective target and government marching orders

V3 and R1 are impressive but didn't advance the absolute capabilities frontier. Maybe the capabilities/cost frontier, though we don't actually know how compute efficient OAI, Anthropic, GDM are. 

I think this part of @gwern's comment doesn't hold up as well:

2. there is no interest or investment in an AI arms race, in part because of a "quiet confidence" (ie. apathy/lying-flat) that if anything important happens, fast-follower China can just catch up a few years later and win the real race. They just aren't doing it. There is no Chinese Manhattan Project. There is no race. They aren't dumping the money into it, and other things, like chips and Taiwan and demographics, are the big concerns which have the focus from the top of the government, and no one is interested in sticking their necks out for wacky things like 'spending a billion dollars on a single training run' without explicit enthusiastic endorsement from the very top.

I still don't think DS is evidence that "China" is racing toward AGI. The US isn't racing toward AGI either. Some American companies are, with varying levels of support from the government. But there's a huge gap between that and Manhattan Project levels of direct govt investment, support, and control.

However, overall, I do think that DS has gotten the CCP more interested in AGI and changed the landscape a lot. 

I'm not convinced that these were bad predictions for the most part.

The main prediction: 1) China lacks compute. 2) CCP values stability and control -> China will not be the first to build unsafe AI/AGI.

Both of these premises are unambiguously true as far as I'm aware. So, these predictions being bad suggests that we now believe China is likely to build AGI without realizing it threatens stability/control, and with minimal compute, before USA? All while refusing to agree to any sort of deal to slow down? Why? Seems unlikely.

American companies, on the other hand, are still explicitly racing toward AGI, are incredibly well resourced, have strong government support, and have a penchant for disruption. The current administration also cares less about stability than any other in recent history.

So, from my perspective, USA racing to AGI looks even more dangerous than before, almost desperate. Whereas China is fast following, which I think everyone expected? Did anyone suggest that China would not be able to fast-follow American AI?

I think Alibaba has not made any crazy developments yet. So let's consider DeepSeek. I think almost nobody had heard of DeepSeek before v3. Before v3, predicting strong AI progress in China would probably sound like "some AI lab in China will appear from nowhere and do something great. I don't know who or what or when or where, but it will happen soon." That was roughly my opinion, at least in my memory. Maybe making that kind of prediction does not match the tastes of people who are good at predicting things? Awfully vague claim to make I guess.

There was time between v3 and r1 where folks could have more loudly commented DeepSeek was ascendant. What would this have accomplished? I suppose it would have shown some commitment to truth and awareness of reality. I am guessing people who are against the international AI race are a bit lazy to point out stuff that would accelerate the race. I guess at some point the facts can't be avoided.

I am not entirely sure what specific thing were the rationalists wrong about (the quotes are about various things) and what specifically is the correct version we should update to.

For example, Eliezer's quote seems to be about how China would prefer a narrow AI (that can be controlled by the Chinese Communist Party) over a general AI, for completely selfish reasons. Do you believe that this is wrong?

I think the main reason is that until a few years ago, not much AI research came out of China. Gwern highlighted this repeatedly.

What is some moderately strong evidence that China (by which I mean Chinese AI labs and/or the CCP) is trying to build AGI, rather than "just": build AI that is useful for whatever they want their AIs to do and not fall behind the West while also not taking the Western claims about AGI/ASI/singularity at face value?

I was not wrong? I argued with Connor about this back in the day on EAI. If you take the PISA scores at face value and account for their higher population, China has like 30x more people above 145 IQ. Steve Hsu has a nice post about this^[1]: 

This appears to be very antimemetic but seems to be true and the world sure is behaving like this is true. 

If human capital matters, they have more and better human capital than America. But human capital will be obsolete soon. 

And I do think much of the idea that China cannot catch up is based on some idiotic, racist notions that asians lack creativity. And this increasingly is becoming obviously massive cope as China catches up and surpasses in industry after industry. And no, semiconductors are not special. They will catch up just fine. 

I think timelines are short, so I would still be betting on an “American god” but if they are longer than I think, China is a contender, and increasing more so in worlds where timelines are long and human capital still matters.

1. ^{^}

   https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2008/06/asian-white-iq-variance-from-pisa.html?m=1

Are you saying they are suicidal?

I think I object level disagree with you on the china vector of existential risk, I think it is a self-fulfilling prophecy and that it does not engage with the current AI situation in china.

If you were object-level correct about china I would agree with the post but I just think you're plain wrong.

Here's a link to a post that makes some points about the general epistmic situation around china: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uRyKkyYstxZkCNcoP/careless-talk-on-us-china-ai-competition-and-criticism-of