There’s something about the way American politics churns out new words and phrases to mask its persistent failings that makes me viscerally ill.
Pace the frontier. Fuck my arse…
98% of the work produced in American capitalist circles are PowerPoint presentations.
Pace the frontier
- General Custer
Pace the frontier. Fuck my arse.
Potato, po-tah-to
This very much sounds like a West-only AI cartel proposal and, in fact, if you read Dario’s essay - under the very telling “pacing within democracies” chapter - he specifically says he’d need the US government to issue an “antitrust waiver” for this.
The plan transparently looks like this: agree among themselves not to compete too hard, get an antitrust waiver to make it legal, and while they’re at it, get Washington - under the veneer of “safety” - to kneecap Chinese competitors because only “democratic” models can be in this “safe pacing” club.
I’m not even exaggerating: Dario pretty much writes this explicitly.
There are 3 steps to his plan and step 2 is literally: “Frontier AI companies within democratic countries coordinate to establish common safety standards as well as limits on the rate of unchecked AI progress” -> the “unchecked AI progress” that would need “limits” is simply AI progress that happens outside their agreement. Another word for it is simply competition.
He also explicitly writes that “a key part of pacing within democracies is to keep democracies’ AI lead over autocracies as large as possible.” You can’t possibly be clearer than this
https://nitter.kareem.one/RnaudBertrand/status/2099019556769656854
It’s so transparent lol, who are the fooling.
I do think the underlying factor is that the bigger models are simply not economically viable at least not with energy costs in the US. And since it’s pretty clear they’re nowhere close to AGI, the investors are likely starting to get cold feet too. So, this seems like a plausible plan to quietly admit they’re hitting limits of what this tech can do, and try to get Chinese models banned in the US.
“Pace the frontier” definitely reads like a euphemism for “substitute competitive R&D with industry capture.” Having third-party evaluators only makes sense from the capitalist standpoint if you’re hitting walls and want to look like you’re doing something even though you are going nowhere fast. When capitalists are knuckling down on developing competitive edge, the last thing they want to do is slow down to have a third party looking over their shoulder.
What this says to me is that they see the writing on the wall of China closing the gap, have lost faith in their ability to outpace them, and so are turning to the usual capitalist methodology of “speak dishonestly and swing a big stick.”
Yup, that’s exactly how I’m reading it. Third party regulators also sound like a way to try and ban Chinese models.
Out of easy gains, out of investor patience, out of power, out of water, out of public goodwill to expansion. But no its AI “agents” becoming those from the matrix and doing a singularity, thats the stopping block.
“Oh gosh, we cant just give you the promised wonderland our god-machine will spawn. Its too scwary. We gotta put chains on god first, and thats gonna take awhile, but keep the money flowing tho. We just gotta pace ourselves bro, make sure we get it right, and regular payments, and we’ll all be eating lotuses in no-time.”
If you pair the above (including https://darioamodei.com/post/we-must-pace-the-frontier from @loathesome_dongeater@spectreofcommunism.boo post) with the below…
US urged to consider military strikes to stop China achieving AGI first https://www.scmp.com/news/us/article/3366284/us-urged-consider-military-strikes-stop-china-achieving-agi-first …
… then it looks like an attempt to take a further dive into war economy while maintaining investor cash flow and delay economic collapse. The thing I am not sure about is what their strategy will be about the critical minerals bottleneck; maybe raid their “backyard” (the Americas) and double down on influence in the Heartlands. I wonder in doing the former they will be inadvertantly accelerating:
https://chateauschmatte.substack.com/p/theses-on-mexicanism-americanism
Yeah, the rare eartths are the elephant in the room. Even under the most aggressive diversification scenarios China is projected to have 80% of the global refining capacity into 2040. I did a deep dive into the whole thing a little while back https://dialecticaldispatches.substack.com/p/the-bifurcated-market
Looks like an interesting read! Thanks for taking the time to write it up
O7
Oh i can tell you about critical minerals.
Have you heard of ameristralia? We may as well not be a sovereign nation we are americas south pacific permanent military base and neither of our 2 main parties has any interest in breaking away from america anytime soon.
Of course - Pine Gap, AUKUS, extradition treaties (eg betrayal against Assange), provider of war criminals abetting the US geopolitical massacres, and home of ASPI (to name a few).
However, I thought most of the export market for the metals is China?
That i believe is current capacity, Australia is pouring billions into developing critical metals to sell to the americans or more likely juat out them have it for sweet fuck all because why should the mineral wealth of the nation be used to benefit the nation as a whole when we can make a couple of rich assholes richer
The issue isn’t really with the mining, it’s the refining technology. China spent decades investing into figuring out how to do this and perfecting this tech. The West can’t replicate that overnight regardless of how much money they throw at the problem.
Didn’t they defacto coup Australia once? After a prime minister wanted to close down that base in the center of Australia?
I believe you are referring to Whitlam, but the actual answer here is no they didnt do it once they mkre the likely did it twice with Whitlam getting too socialist and wanting to be less reliant on the US and Kevin Rudd being well al i can figure is he spoke mandarin which means he was too pro China for thier liking. I beleive they had a hand in both, the Whitlam dismissal seems almost certainly to have american involvement though
That rings a bell - unless I got it mixed up /misremembered they got UK’s Queen Elizabeth II to invoke some old law to override the Australian PM.
Yes exactly that!
My teacher once called me stupid because I said the Queen once used her powers to override the PM of Australia - so I kept remembering that incident .
I completely forgot about that till you mentioned it.
I think he was lucky enough to survive as opposed to the Swedish Olof Palme (https://redsails.org/why-marxism/) who I’m pretty sure got assasinated by the US for going against the empire. If you read the accused summary bit at the top of the wiki article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Olof_Palme you can see how dodgy it all is and the state effectively deciding not to pursue it any further. That could have been potentially the Australian PM’s fate if things turned out a different way.
Let’s run this through the ol’ techgrift translator…
BEEP BOOP BEEP BEEP
Our plagiarism machine is seeing diminishing returns and we’re beginning to be called on our bullshit by even the most credulous of the investor class and we need to pivot to the next grift while retaining our techno-prophet schtick
Sounds like a euphemism for “the Chinese are going to catch up with our models, so we want big daddy government to ban open weight models.”
Or maybe its like electric cars where they have gone way past
Sadly, they aren’t that dumb. In Amodei’s essay, he writes:
Do not sell powerful AI chips or semiconductor manufacturing equipment to China, and crack down on chip smuggling operations and remote access to data centers outside China. Chips will be the main determinant of China’s AI strength.
Crack down on unauthorized by companies in authoritarian countries. Distillation of frontier models allows lagging companies to narrow the gap using a fraction of the cost it would take to develop their own AI independently.
Of course, this is a naked attempt to defend what remains of US technological hegemony, but there is still much the west can do to hurt China’s progress. For example, the recent DUV machines China developed require western components such as mirrors from Zeiss.
At this point I don’t think any of that matters. Companies like Huawei are already making domestic chips and the latest GLM was trained entirely without using any Nvidia chips. DeepSeek has also been moving to Chinese chips last I read. All the US attempts to slow China down have backfired so far because China recognizes the strategic importance of this tech and they’re putting state level resources behind it. In the short term, China will still be able to source the tech it needs through intermediaries, but in a few years they’re going to be entirely self sufficient.
There’s also the flip side here which is that China controls a lot of key inputs like rare earths which they have been quietly cutting off. It doesn’t matter if the US can design better chips if they can’t actually produce them.
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“pace the frontier” maybe is some techbro slang for "hyperscaling is not working, people are protesting and it’s too expensive, we need to focus in make it cheaper and faster with less infrastructure
“third party evaluators” maybe is techbro slang for “we need to create another way to make investors give us more money to avoid masive use of chinese LLMs by enterprises”
“Our next models are showing little to no improvement.”
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