China Hawks are Manufacturing an AI Arms Race

This is really important pushback. This is the discussion we need to be having.

Most people who are trying to track this believe China has not been racing toward AGI up to this point. Whether they embark on that race is probably being determined now - and based in no small part on the US's perceived attitude and intentions.

Any calls for racing toward AGI should be closely accompanied with "and of course we'd use it to benefit the entire world, sharing the rapidly growing pie". If our intentions are hostile, foreign powers have little choice but to race us.

And we should not be so confident we will remain ahead if we do race. There are many routes to progress other than sheer scale of pretraining. The release of DeepSeek r1 today indicates that China is not so far behind. Let's remember that while the US "won" the race for nukes, our primary rival had nukes very soon after - by stealing our advancements. A standoff between AGI-armed US and China could be disastrous - or navigated successfully if we take the right tone and prevent further proliferation (I shudder to think of Putin controlling an AGI, or many potentially unstable actors).

This discussion is important, so it needs to be better. This pushback is itself badly flawed. In calling out the report's lack of references, it provides almost none itself. Citing a 2017 official statement from China seems utterly irrelevant to guessing their current, privately held position. Almost everyone has updated massively since 2017. If China is "racing toward AGI" as an internal policy, they probably would've adopted that recently. (I doubt that they are racing yet, but it seems entirely possible they'll start now in response to the US push to do so - and the their perspective on the US as a dangerous aggressor on the world stage. But what do I know - we need real experts on China and international relations.)

Pointing out the technical errors in the report seems irrelevant to harmful. You can understand very little of the details and still understand that AGI would be a big, big deal if true — and the many experts predicting short timelines could be right. Nitpicking the technical expertise of people who are essentially probably correct in their assessment just sets a bad tone of fighting/arguing instead of having a sensible discussion.

And we desperately need a sensible discussion on this topic.

This post seems important-if-right. I get a vibe from it of aiming to persuade more than explain, and I'd be interested in multiple people gathering/presenting evidence about this, preferably at least some of them who are (currently) actively worried about China.

The recent trend is towards shorter lag times between OAI et al. performance and Chinese competitors.

Just today, Deepseek claimed to match O1-preview performance--that is a two month delay.

I do not know about CCP intent, and I don't know on what basis the authors of this report base their claims, but "China is racing towards AGI ... It's critical that we take them extremely seriously" strikes me as a fair summary of the recent trend in model quality and model quantity from Chinese companies (Deepseek, Qwen, Yi, Stepfun, etc.)

I recommend lmarena.ai s leaderboard tab as a one-stop-shop overview of the state of AI competition.

The Commission recommends: [...] 1. Congress establish and fund a Manhattan Project-like program dedicated to racing to and acquiring an Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) capability.

As mentioned above, the choice of Manhattan Project instead of Apollo Project is glaring.

Worse, there is zero mention of AI safety, AI alignment, or AI evaluation in the Recommendations document.

Lest you think I'm expecting too much, the report does talk about safety, alignment, and evaluation ... for non-AI topic areas! (see bolded words below: "safety", "aligning", "evaluate")

• "Congress direct the U.S. Government Accountability Office to investigate the reliability of safety testing certifications for consumer products and medical devices imported from China." (page 736)
• "Congress direct the Administration to create an Outbound Investment Office within the executive branch to oversee investments into countries of concern, including China. The office should have a dedicated staff and appropriated resources and be tasked with: [...] Expanding the list of covered sectors with the goal of aligning outbound investment restrictions with export controls." (page 737)
• "Congress direct the U.S. Department of the Treasury, in coordination with the U.S. Departments of State and Commerce, to provide the relevant congressional committees a report assessing the ability of U.S. and foreign financial institutions operating in Hong Kong to identify and prevent transactions that facilitate the transfer of products, technology, and money to Russia, Iran, and other sanctioned countries and entities in violation of U.S. export controls, financial sanctions, and related rules. The report should [...] Evaluate the extent of Hong Kong’s role in facilitating the transfer of products and technologies to Russia, Iran, other adversary countries, and the Mainland, which are prohibited by export controls from being transferred to such countries;" (page 741)