\nFor the first 120 years of that steady improvement, horses didn’t notice at all. \u2026 Progress in engines was steady. Equivalence to horses was sudden.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
China<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Lovely is correct to report that AI companies aren’t very good at keeping secrets, but he overstates how much that matters:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\nAll of this means slowing US frontier software progress, via regulation or other means, wouldn’t hand China a lead it couldn’t otherwise achieve; it would slow the entire pack.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
Copying US AI is not the main source of Chinese AI progress. This is an area with much disagreement among experts. Distillation is real, but overrated. My guess is that at least half of Chinese AI progress is due to there being plenty of low hanging fruit that many experts can find. Chinese companies face different constraints than US companies due to restrictions on selling compute to China. Chinese companies have adapted to their compute scarcity by focusing on performance optimizations that were lower priority for US companies. That means there were some medium-value respects in which China has led the US. See Aidan Gomez<\/a>, Kyle Chan<\/a>, and Min et al<\/a> for more thorough arguments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
On the other hand, Lovely underestimates how willing the Chinese government would be to slow an AI capabilities race if there were enough evidence to convince Trump to do the same. They’re not very eager to race toward superintelligence. Instead, they’re racing toward widespread deployment of AI applications such as robotics, which is where they have an advantage over the US.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\nAI’s China hawks – Altman and Amodei – are right about one thing: there is<\/em> a titanic struggle over who controls the future. But it’s not between democracies and autocracies, it’s between humanity and them<\/em>.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
There are multiple struggles over AI. Lovely oversimplifies here. I want encourage more cooperative approaches to handling AI. I worry about Lovely encouraging conflict.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Antitrust<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
One of Lovely’s policy prescriptions starts with the great title “Too big to guardrail”. But he mostly wants to make AI companies smaller by using antitrust law.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Antitrust action to break up Nvidia or TSMC could make AI more affordable to the average person, more affordable to companies that want to replace human workers with AIs, and could help ensure that many nations have drone armies, rather than drone armies being concentrated in a smaller number of powerful nations. Those seem like mostly the opposite of what Lovely and I want.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Lovely seems more focused on breaking up Anthropic and OpenAI. But antitrust seems like the wrong tool here. Much of what concerns me about those two are the reckless competition between them that closely matches what antitrust law promotes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Maybe Lovely has a good idea about how to make AI companies smaller, but he sure failed to communicate it here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
How Obsolete is the Book?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
AI and the political landscape around it have changed frequently in the 6 months between when Lovely finished writing the book and publication. Most authors would have several claims about AI that got falsified in that time period. Roughly none of Lovely’s claims about what AIs do have been discredited, partly because he minimizes his reliance on claims about what AI can and can’t do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Lovely has more mixed success at predicting what humans would do, but still looks pretty good.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\nIf you model OpenAI as an organization trying to use AI to improve the world, you’ll be left confused by decisions like [releasing Sora]. But if you model it like Netflix or Meta – as another company trying to maximize its ownership share in all human attention – everything makes sense.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
A month after Lovely finished writing the book, OpenAI shut down Sora. Apparently, owning much of our attention isn’t very valuable compared to what OpenAI is prioritizing now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\nAnthropic’s alignment strategy simply wasn’t robust to a would-be despot taking the White House, even though it had already fucking happened.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
This seems to refer to the Supply Chain Risk designation<\/a>. I’d say Anthropic’s strategy worked as well as we could hope for, unlike some of its competitors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\nSenator Bernie Sanders offered one answer in late 2025: a moratorium on data center construction in the US. In a world of half-measures, his proposal embodies the ambition needed to meet the moment.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
Lovely proceeds in the next few paragraphs to mostly admit that the 2025 proposal was an inadequate half-measure. But he was partly prophetic, in that Sanders introduced a sufficiently ambitious bill<\/a> just before Obsolete was published.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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