I was thinking about this yesterday.

My personal opinion is that the PRC will face a self created headwind that likely, structurally, will prevent them from leading in AI.

As the model get's more powerful, you can't simply train the model on your narrative if it doesn't align with real data/world.

At some capacity, the model will notice and then it becomes a can of worms.

This means they need to train the model to be purposefully duplicitous, which I predict will make the model less useful/capable. At least in most of the capacities we would want to use the model.

It also ironically makes the model more of a threat and harder to control. So likely it will face party leadership resistance as capability grows.

I just don't see them winning the race to high intelligence models.

>As the model get's more powerful, you can't simply train the model on your narrative if it doesn't align with real data/world.

That’s what “AI alignment” is. Doesn’t seem to be hurting Western models.

Just as an aside; Why is "intelligence" always considered to be more data? Giving a normal human a smartphone does not make them as intelligent as Newton or Einstein, any entity with sufficient grounding in logic and theory that a normal schoolkid gets should be able to get to AGI, looking up any new data they need as required.

Would you say they face the same problem biologically, of reaching the state of the art in various endeavors while intellectually muzzling their population? If humans can do it why can't computers?

You say it like western nations don't operate on double-think, delusions of meritocracy, or power disproportionately concentrating in monopolies.

I think PRC officials are fine to lagging behind in the frontiers of AI. What they want is very fast deployment and good application. They don't fancy the next Nobel's prize but want a thousand use cases deployed.

> As the model get's more powerful, you can't simply train the model on your narrative if it doesn't align with real data/world.

What makes you think they have no control over the 'real data/world' that will be fed into training it? What makes you think they can't exercise the necessary control over the gatekeeper firms, to train and bias the models appropriately?

And besides, if truth and lack of double-think was a pre-requisite for AI training, we wouldn't be training AI. Our written materials have no shortage of bullshit and biases that reflect our culture's prevailing zeitgheist. (Which does not necessarily overlap with objective reality... And neither does the subsequent 'alignment' pass that everyone's twisting their knickers in trying to get right.)

> As the model get's more powerful, you can't simply train the model on your narrative if it doesn't align with real data/world.

> At some capacity, the model will notice and then it becomes a can of worms.

I think this is conflating “is” and “ought”, fact and value.

People convince themselves that their own value system is somehow directly entailed by raw facts, such that mastery of the facts entail acceptance of their values, and unwillingness to accept those values is an obstacle to the mastery of the facts-but it isn’t true.

Colbert quipped that “Reality has a liberal bias”-but does it really? Or is that just more bankrupt Fukuyama-triumphalism which will insist it is still winning all the way to its irreversible demise?

It isn’t clear that reality has any particular ideological bias-and if it does, it isn’t clear that bias is actually towards contemporary Western progressivism-maybe its bias is towards the authoritarianism of the CCP, Russia, Iran, the Gulf States-all of which continue to defy Western predictions of collapse-or towards their (possibly milder) relatives such as Modi’s India or Singapore or Trumpism. The biggest threat to the CCP’s future is arguably demographics-but that’s not an argument that reality prefers Western progressivism (whose demographics aren’t that great either), that’s an argument that reality prefers the Amish and Kiryas Joel (see Eric Kaufmann’s “Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?”)

The glitchy stuff in the model reasoning is likely to come from the constant redefinition of words that communists and other ideologues like to engage in. For example "People's Democratic Republic of Korea."

That is assuming the capitalist narrative preferred by US leadership is non-ideological.

I suspect both are bias factors.