Notes from my study abroad in the capitol of the world's empire

The DC Metro //

AI stuff

I'm learning about AI legislation and the AI race — not because I necessarily want to, but because I have to for work. Here's what I learned after asking a battery of very basic questions to my coworkers:

• There's this vague but powerful meme of the AI race between the US and China, but no one can tell me what we're racing toward. "Superhuman AI" or AGI (artificial general intelligence) or something of that sort probably. AI doomers (people who are pessimistic/fearful of the future of AI) think we could be tending toward something with negative potential close to the scale of a nuclear bomb. Americans want to win the AI race, which I will refer to from here on out as Calvinball, because I think we're acting like it's some sort of game we're all playing in the abstract and doesn't have an actual goal.
• We reaaalllly don't want China to win Calvinball because we're worried about how Chinese AI companies will handle "alignment," which really just means that we don't trust Chinese AI companies to build AI with humanistic values. (This strikes me as pretty racist, haven't seen any evidence that China would build AI that is any more misaligned with human flourishing than what we're building in the US. Nonetheless probably a useful set of fears to employ if you're working on AI in the US and want to be part of leading the world in AI.)
• US and Chinese companies need American chips to develop yoked AI models. The companies with the most advanced AI models are winning Calvinball on behalf of the country they’re based in. 
• Last year, Chinese companies smuggled 140,000 chips (worth $5-7B) into China through e.g. Malaysian shell companies. The Chip Security Act is a bill that we can pass to give Congress’ one more big blunt tool to prevent China from doing more of this in an effort to win Calvinball. A bunch of people I know are trying to get the Chip Security Act passed, but it's kind of a republican bill, which means that they need to win over democrats.
• I was wondering if it's actually true, or just a cultural delusion that the US creates the best GPUs in the world, but apparently it's a fact, and the US is big-dicking everyone else into not being able to catch up:
• They can’t build semiconductors, which they need to stay competitive.
• ASML, a company in the Netherlands, produces semiconductor manufacturing equipment, big machines that are used to make chips.
• TSMC has big plants in Taiwan that make the chips for Nvidia and other American chip design companies. They have a sick ass logo
• The Netherlands and Taiwan are US allies, and the US has set powerful rules called export controls that determine who our allies can export their computing products to. Taiwan and the Netherlands are now forbidden from exporting chips to China, so China has to resort to smuggling to stay competitive.
• I did ask: How the FUCK did we set these rules? Who let us do this? And the answer is that we kinda just can. Will probably do more digging on this later.
• Nvidia and other chip design companies make money by selling chips to American companies like OpenAI and Anthropic. Mistral in France, cloud computer providers, distributors, etc. Chinese companies can use the obscurity in this distribution network to their advantage and find clever ways to obtain chips through shell companies and cloud-based services. An important first step in thwarting smuggling is figuring out where chips are once they leave the country.
• Smuggling is a real problem
• We can use location verification technology that's already built into chips as a way to figure out if chips that we've exported have ended up in suspiciously dense clusters in China

DC culture

• I think that the broad strokes of the Scholar's Stage post comparing the respective intellectual cultures of SF and DC are pretty accurate. 
• No one here really dances at concerts?

Policy vocabulary that I'll define later

For better or worse, I've noticed a lot of incel speak. "There's so much alpha in WSJ op-eds explaining AI safety concepts," said my coworker today. 

• memetic
• memeplex
• meta- literally anything
• def/acc or literally anything /acc
• EA (effective altruism)