I think this is a (c) leaning (b), especially given that we're doing it in public. Remember, the Manhattan Project was a highly-classified effort and we know it by an innocuous name given to it to avoid attention.
Saying publicly, "yo, China, we view this as an all-costs priority, hbu" is a great way to trigger a race with China...
But if it turned out that we knew from ironclad intel with perfect sourcing that China was already racing (I don't expect this to be the case), then I would lean back more towards (c).
Thanks, looking forward to it! Please do let us folks who worked on A Narrow Path (especially me, @Tolga , and @Andrea_Miotti ) know if we can be helpful in bouncing around ideas as you work on the treaty proposal!
Is there a longer-form version with draft treaty langugage (even an outline)? I'd be curious to read it.
I think people opposing this have a belief that the counterfactual is "USG doesn't have LLMs" instead of "USG spins up its own LLM development effort using the NSA's no-doubt-substantial GPU clusters".
Needless to say, I think the latter is far more likely.
I think the thing that you're not considering is that when tunnels are more prevalent and more densely packed, the incentives to use the defensive strategy of "dig a tunnel, then set off a very big bomb in it that collapses many tunnels" gets far higher. It wouldn't always be infantry combat, it would often be a subterranean equivalent of indirect fires.
Ok, so Anthropic's new policy post (explicitly NOT linkposting it properly since I assume @Zac Hatfield-Dodds or @Evan Hubinger or someone else from Anthropic will, and figure the main convo should happen there, and don't want to incentivize fragmenting of conversation) seems to have a very obvious implication.
Unrelated, I just slammed a big AGI-by-2028 order on Manifold Markets.
Yup. The fact that the profession that writes the news sees "I should resign in protest" as their own responsibility in this circumstance really reveals something.
At LessOnline, there was a big discussion one night around the picnic tables with @Eliezer_Yudkovsky , @habryka , and some interlocutors from the frontier labs (you'll momentarily see why I'm being vague on the latter names).
One question was: "does DC actually listen to whistleblowers?" and I contributed that, in fact, DC does indeed have a script for this, and resigning in protest is a key part of it, especially ever since the Nixon years.
Here is a usefully publicly-shareable anecdote on how strongly this norm is embedded in national security decision-making, from the New Yorker article "The U.S. Spies Who Sound the Alarm About Election Interference" by David Kirkpatrick, Oct 21, 2024:
(https://archive.ph/8Nkx5)
The experts’ chair insisted that in this cycle the intelligence agencies had not withheld information “that met all five of the criteria”—and did not risk exposing sources and methods. Nor had the leaders’ group ever overruled a recommendation by the career experts. And if they did? It would be the job of the chair of the experts’ group to stand up or speak out, she told me: “That is why we pick a career civil servant who is retirement-eligible.” In other words, she can resign in protest.
As you know, I have huge respect for USG natsec folks. But there are (at least!) two flavors of them: 1) the cautious, measure-twice-cut-once sort that have carefully managed deterrencefor decades, and 2) the "fuck you, I'm doing Iran-Contra" folks. Which do you expect will get in control of such a program ? It's not immediately clear to me which ones would.