Huawei shortages also show that middle powers can't 'hedge toward China' on AI: there's no alternative to the US if you want frontier compute capacity at scale. tough spot for the world, but a great position for the US to leverage for global influence. if the admin wants to!

was great to talk to @jordanschneider about AI politics getting real! in the face of volatile public opionion, I think the trick - on safety, datacenters, jobs - is to find the least harmful policy that people could still be convinced to like.

aggressive intervention into the viability of (Chinese) OS seems highly likely. I’m not sure what else Dean’s critics think the stable equilibrium here is - if anything, based on what we know, his prediction of well-calibrated FUD seems outright optimistic. (a) the administration has a tendency toward capricious overreaction to novel (to them) risks emerging as capabilities advance, overindexing on the specifics of the case over principled trade-offs. just look at the radical shift of the entire AI policy discussion toward the cyber/finance nexus post-Mythos. (b) the administration has been specifically unwilling to tolerate the ambiguities that come with wide availability of capabilities, even beyond most observers' imagination: the overreaction to the Fable jailbreak vulnerability in particular demonstrated just how highly they prized the sort of unilateral control over dangerous capabilities that Glasswing and the EO gave them. cybersecurity is perhaps the domain where the OS story has the most precedent, and even here the admin reached for radical intervention when it learned the classifiers weren't airtight. classifier-based safety by design obviously definitionally doesn't work with OS models! (c) the economics of the American stock market, especially as AI investment diversifies away from Nvidia and toward the soon-IPOing frontier labs. the expectation of blockbuster IPOs is already keeping some things afloat, and even the taxation structure imagined in ideas of a 'stake' in the labs presupposes a fairly specific economic structure. letting open source dissemination of models beyond a certain threshold of economic usefulness proceed unhindered is a threat to that structure, and therefore a threat for an administration that really doesn't want more economic bad news. and as long as it's Chinese products that are eating into this economic model, there isn't even much of a free-marketer faction left in government that would be willing and able to oppose crackdowns wrapped in protectionist rhetoric. the fact that this is incentive-aligned with OpenAI, or whether this is predatory trade strategy or furthering the economic commons by China, is beside the point - the US stock market is what it is, and volatile as it is, the idea that a government in charge would risk its reorientation is mistaken. (d) the policy infrastructure of frontier AI oversight is headed the same way! much of the admin's confidence or lack thereof in how well AI oversight is going is based on their conversations with the leading labs. for this admin, this is a relationship-based business, and as long as AI risks de facto run through their known interlocutors, they'll feel a lot more comfortable. they'll be incentivised to retain that status quo, where they can exert control through the relationships they have, rather than having to make predetermined policy on the substantive merits. (e) it's pretty easy to screw with open source if you're the admin! you can mess with procurement etc as Dean mentions. but you can also call up hyperscalers and float some absurd interventionist ideas if they continue to host Chinese OS at scale. that's the problem with the token-hungry structure of deployments compared to OS software: this all runs through extremely expensive, mostly centralised, infrastructure. it doesn't matter that there's no legal basis to intervene into OS hosting. what does matter is that hyperscaler firms are deeply extended into datacenter capex and deeply afraid of the admin coming up with some absurdly illegal way to apply securitised statute that crashes the market. they wouldn't call the admin's bluff. how else if not toward hamfisted intervention to the decisive detriment of open source do you possibly bring these factors together? the intervention model Dean is 'hyperstitioning' (describing) here is in fact among the least invasive you could come up with - I'd half expect it to go rather worse than he describes.