If the other front-age article on the Science publication about how human population will have overwhelmed the earth by now isn't enough warning, then I'm old enough to remember how the "Japanese economic miracle" was going to inevitably overwhelm the US.
There is a serious lack of wisdom in lots of these statements.
I like to remind people that multiple mainstream "AI Safety" campaigners have called for first strikes on Chinese data centers:
In a new report titled “Superpowers and AGI,” former Obama-era national security official Jacob Stokes calls for United States to begin preparing readiness drills in response to Chinese AI development — up to and including military strikes on the nation’s data centers, the South China Morning Post reported.
“Data centers can be bombed with conventional munitions,” Stokes writes. (He’s not the first thinker to suggest bombings to stop powerful AI; in 2023, AI critic Eliezer Yudkowsky suggested that countries needed to be ready to “destroy a rogue data center by airstrike.”)
> In a new report titled “Superpowers and AGI,” former Obama-era national security official Jacob Stokes calls for United States to begin preparing readiness drills in response to Chinese AI development — up to and including military strikes on the nation’s data centers, the South China Morning Post reported.
War Hawks gotta war hawk.
Ever since the fall of the USSR, there has been a faction of people in the USA desperately trying to invent a new "enemy" to scare everyone and drive foreign policy.
US people are kind of lunatically liberal in a few dimensions, like jaded person. Remember the extremely dismaying showings of political extremist behaviors?
You don't need the AI chips money to fund solar expansion. Solar panels are already tariffed exuberantly. Removing that tariff, solar expansion will not be faster at all, because there will be another random political faction coming out to eat the profit.
This country inherited a honorable tradition that is no longer fitting in this highly connected world. And few people are educated to objectively acknowledge that.
Solar panels don't run at night. Betting on batteries is betting on an exponential that's been growing at a third the speed it needs to for it to be meaningful. China's grid uses them to lower emissions during the day but has idle coal plants to keep the lights on definitely.
This is something a capitalism country can't do.
In short we need to build a five grids worth of nuclear power plants as a national security priority, the same way the interstate highway network was, if we want to have any chance of keeping up.
In the mean time we can use gas turbines to make up the short fall for the next five years.
The past few years, being either compute constrained or energy constrained has driven many innovations in this space. Either way, higher availability of resources does not always equate higher utilisation.
OK, so the more energy constrained country (US) has to innovate, then china steals the innovations and leverages them even further due to their massive energy resources. In the end energy wins always.
yall looking at the first picture. read the damn post. his point is not that we need to scramble to catch up on energy but that we need a path to a two-body equilibrium on both energy and compute.
I believe the implication is that their society has different baseline energy needs before compute even comes into play. And compute requirements are also multiplicative with population.
What a weird take. China should be generating more electricity than the US, if only because they have 4x the number of people. And regardless, "generating electricity" is not automatically some sort of advantage.
And I don't get his link to the X post that he's labeled "nationalizing nvidia"; what he links to is... not that.
I agree in general that the US is completely mismanaging the adversarial relationship with China, but this post reads like a conspiracy theorist fever dream.
Permitting reform is currently working its way through congress, for what it's worth.
It's federal permitting, local "NIMBY" veto control over everything, state environmental laws, tariffs on solar equipment, and out of control costs on infrastructure in the US (a combination of corruption, overpowered unions, and regulations).
Like many problems in the US, the causes are many and diffused across different layers of government, different departments, making it very difficult to solve.
> Sell as many AI chips into China as possible, use the money to purchase solar panel and battery factories, and build out electricity capacity as quickly as possible.
This... isn't how capitalism works. If nVidia or whoever sells chips the money doesn't just magically go into strategic infrastructure
Is there a reason this is on the front page of one of the only mainstream tech forums in the West?
Claims like: "It probably doesn’t work, can you outthink steel and drone production? I don’t see how, see my critiques here. But I’m not totally sure, I’m not a superintelligence. And if it does work, that may be the end"
"Whatever capabilities you have today will eventually be matched, unless… you believe that you can use ASI in a decapitating first strike."
"My likelihood of imminent WWIII went up a lot with the nationalization of NVIDIA."
Who is this guy? The head of another AI driving company? Yet he feels qualified to make wargaming predictions between nation states and somehow end up on the front page with a few substanceless paragraphs and one graph. Wow. Is this pay to win? I know I am being critical and I apologize but come on, we can do so much better as a community and as a culture.
EDIT: this had no comments or upvotes really when I posted this
The future is unwritten.
If the other front-age article on the Science publication about how human population will have overwhelmed the earth by now isn't enough warning, then I'm old enough to remember how the "Japanese economic miracle" was going to inevitably overwhelm the US.
There is a serious lack of wisdom in lots of these statements.
I like to remind people that multiple mainstream "AI Safety" campaigners have called for first strikes on Chinese data centers:
In a new report titled “Superpowers and AGI,” former Obama-era national security official Jacob Stokes calls for United States to begin preparing readiness drills in response to Chinese AI development — up to and including military strikes on the nation’s data centers, the South China Morning Post reported.
“Data centers can be bombed with conventional munitions,” Stokes writes. (He’s not the first thinker to suggest bombings to stop powerful AI; in 2023, AI critic Eliezer Yudkowsky suggested that countries needed to be ready to “destroy a rogue data center by airstrike.”)
https://futurism.com/science-energy/obama-admin-official-sto...
https://www.cnas.org/publications/reports/superpowers-and-ag...
> In a new report titled “Superpowers and AGI,” former Obama-era national security official Jacob Stokes calls for United States to begin preparing readiness drills in response to Chinese AI development — up to and including military strikes on the nation’s data centers, the South China Morning Post reported.
War Hawks gotta war hawk.
Ever since the fall of the USSR, there has been a faction of people in the USA desperately trying to invent a new "enemy" to scare everyone and drive foreign policy.
US people are kind of lunatically liberal in a few dimensions, like jaded person. Remember the extremely dismaying showings of political extremist behaviors?
You don't need the AI chips money to fund solar expansion. Solar panels are already tariffed exuberantly. Removing that tariff, solar expansion will not be faster at all, because there will be another random political faction coming out to eat the profit.
This country inherited a honorable tradition that is no longer fitting in this highly connected world. And few people are educated to objectively acknowledge that.
Solar panels don't run at night. Betting on batteries is betting on an exponential that's been growing at a third the speed it needs to for it to be meaningful. China's grid uses them to lower emissions during the day but has idle coal plants to keep the lights on definitely.
This is something a capitalism country can't do.
In short we need to build a five grids worth of nuclear power plants as a national security priority, the same way the interstate highway network was, if we want to have any chance of keeping up.
In the mean time we can use gas turbines to make up the short fall for the next five years.
That’s generation. What about usage? If they were at capacity, wouldn’t it be the same story?
Due to the laws of physics, electricity generation and usages are very nearly 1:1. Electricity storage is basically a rounding error.
I.e. if you turn on a light switch in your home, somewhere, a turbine has almost certainly just sped up very slightly within a speed of light delay.
The past few years, being either compute constrained or energy constrained has driven many innovations in this space. Either way, higher availability of resources does not always equate higher utilisation.
OK, so the more energy constrained country (US) has to innovate, then china steals the innovations and leverages them even further due to their massive energy resources. In the end energy wins always.
That would more seem a side-effect of being constrained in some dimension, whether compute, energy, or else.
The same could be said about deepseek given they had to innovate with limited compute?
Exactly, but with the miniaturisation frontier still ahead of us.
yall looking at the first picture. read the damn post. his point is not that we need to scramble to catch up on energy but that we need a path to a two-body equilibrium on both energy and compute.
Geohot, pierce through the noises as always, have the most brilliant thoughts.
he said years ago he believes factoring is in P. i wonder if he will turn out to be right.
Of note, China has a population roughly 4x that of the US
Which advantage(s) of a larger population do you believe is involved here?
I believe the implication is that their society has different baseline energy needs before compute even comes into play. And compute requirements are also multiplicative with population.
and roughly equal (1x not 4x) land when you include hawaii and Alaska.
What a weird take. China should be generating more electricity than the US, if only because they have 4x the number of people. And regardless, "generating electricity" is not automatically some sort of advantage.
And I don't get his link to the X post that he's labeled "nationalizing nvidia"; what he links to is... not that.
I agree in general that the US is completely mismanaging the adversarial relationship with China, but this post reads like a conspiracy theorist fever dream.
How's the per capita energy looking? Still lower despite China being a manufacturing and industrial hub?
What’s stopping more electricity being generated in the US? It’s both financial and political, but private business could step up here?
Permitting reform is currently working its way through congress, for what it's worth.
It's federal permitting, local "NIMBY" veto control over everything, state environmental laws, tariffs on solar equipment, and out of control costs on infrastructure in the US (a combination of corruption, overpowered unions, and regulations).
Like many problems in the US, the causes are many and diffused across different layers of government, different departments, making it very difficult to solve.
regulatory capture by coal and gas companies
They're literally paying wind farm companies billions to go away - https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-rwe-wind-farms/
> Sell as many AI chips into China as possible, use the money to purchase solar panel and battery factories, and build out electricity capacity as quickly as possible.
This... isn't how capitalism works. If nVidia or whoever sells chips the money doesn't just magically go into strategic infrastructure
Taxes
> If trends continue, China will have 10x the electricity of the US in 10 years.
And if trends had continued from 1900, our streets would be covered 200 feet high in horse droppings.
Oddly enough, this is a solid example of how innovation leads to improvements in infrastructure.
Is there a reason this is on the front page of one of the only mainstream tech forums in the West?
Claims like: "It probably doesn’t work, can you outthink steel and drone production? I don’t see how, see my critiques here. But I’m not totally sure, I’m not a superintelligence. And if it does work, that may be the end"
"Whatever capabilities you have today will eventually be matched, unless… you believe that you can use ASI in a decapitating first strike."
"My likelihood of imminent WWIII went up a lot with the nationalization of NVIDIA."
Who is this guy? The head of another AI driving company? Yet he feels qualified to make wargaming predictions between nation states and somehow end up on the front page with a few substanceless paragraphs and one graph. Wow. Is this pay to win? I know I am being critical and I apologize but come on, we can do so much better as a community and as a culture.
EDIT: this had no comments or upvotes really when I posted this