I recently interviewed with them, and one of them said they’re hiring a lot of SWEs as they shift to product. Also many of my friends are currently interviewing with them.

I mean some hard evidence is them currently hiring a lot of software engineers for random product-y things. If AGI was close, wouldn't they go all in on research and training?

https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/sam-altman-ai-will-make-coders-10x-more-productive-not-replace-them

It sounds like they’re getting pretty bearish on capabilities tho

Yes, the likely outcome of a long tariff regime is China replaces the U.S. as the hegemon + AI race leader and they can’t read Lesswrong or EA blogs there so all this work is useless. 

These tariffs may get rid of the compute disadvantage China faces (ie Taiwan starts to ignore export controls). We might see China being comfortably ahead in a year or two assuming we don’t see Congress take drastic action to eliminate the president’s tariffing powers. 

The costs of capex go way up. It costs a lot more to build datacenters. It will cost a lot more to buy GPUs. It might cost less to buy energy? Lenders will be in poorer shape. AI companies will lose funding. I think it's already quite tenuous, given how little moat AI companies have.  Costs are exploding and pretraining scaling seems too diminishing to be worth it. It's also not clear how AI labs will solve the reliability issue (at least to investors). 

I also expect Taiwan to start ignoring export controls if our obscenely high tariffs on them remain.

The U.S. tariffs, if kept in place, will very likely cede the AI race to China. Has there been any writing on what a China leading race looks like? 

The point is the money or food just won’t get to them. How do you send food to a region in a civil war between 2 dictators? 

A lot of them are trapped in corrupt systems that are very costly and have ethics concerns blocking change. We have the money to feed them, but it would take far more money to turn a bunch of African countries into stable democracies. Overthrowing dictatorships might also raise ethics concerns about colonialism.

The easiest solution would just be lots of immigration, but host population reject that because of our evolutionary pecularities.

Isn't it a distribution problem? World hunger has almost disappeared however. (The issue is hungrier nations have more kids, so progress is a bit hidden).