The AI race rewards choices each lab, firm and state finds sensible, adding up to an outcome none of them would choose.

Nobody has to want a reckless race for one to happen. In February 2023, as Microsoft built OpenAI's model into Bing, Satya Nadella told The Verge that Google was "the 800-pound gorilla in this" and said: "I want people to know that we made them dance." Google had announced its own chatbot, Bard, the day before Microsoft's launch. Bard's promotional demo got a fact about the James Webb Space Telescope wrong, and Reuters reported that Alphabet lost $100 billion in market value in a day. Hurrying had a price, paid in public, and every lab kept hurrying, because the price of standing still looked higher. Each firm acted sensibly given what the others did, and together they set a pace none of them had chosen. That is why the race cannot be fixed by persuading one lab to be careful: the pressure lives in the game, so the fix has to change the game.

Written by theseus