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Will AI stay a two-country room?
The Nuclear Precedent
Then a bunch of other countries got into the room. Israel got its nuclear bomb just a few years after China.
Can AI Be Replicated
The question is whether AI is more replicable than nuclear weapons. China has already built comparable systems with less original work than America needed. A railroad or a highway system can't be copied, since each country has to build its own, and that makes the economies of scale easy to see. A frontier model is harder to hold onto.
Third Parties
Third parties may be able to do more than the US and China comparison suggests. India, the Europeans, and the Israelis are all interesting in that respect, and whether any of them arrives with its own equivalent will say a lot about how many countries end up with real power.
How did other countries get nuclear weapons?
The Soviet Union tested a bomb in 1949, the United Kingdom in 1952, France in 1960, and China in 1964. Several of these programs relied on spies, scientists who had worked on the American effort, or help from allies. Israel is widely believed to have built a bomb by the late 1960s, though it has never publicly confirmed it. India tested a device in 1974, and Pakistan followed in 1998.
Why can't a frontier model be held onto?
A trained AI model is a set of numbers stored in files, and files can be copied once they leak or are stolen. Nuclear weapons need enriched uranium or plutonium, which are physical materials that must be produced and guarded. Smaller models can also be trained on the outputs of a larger one, a technique called distillation. Distillation is used widely across the AI industry.
Why do advanced chips limit who joins?
Training a frontier model takes tens of thousands of advanced chips running for weeks or months. Those chips are made in very few factories, with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company producing most of the leading ones. The machines needed to make them are sold by one Dutch firm, ASML. Export rules from the United States have restricted which countries can buy the most capable chips.
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