For frontier AI models you don't need a few GPUs or a small cluster. You need thousands of them, you need them all connected with high bandwidth and you need a lot of power. It's not something you can do in your garage or undetected.
There is some risk that over time people will be able to do more with less, and eventually you can train an AGI with a few dozen A100s. If that happens I agree there's nothing you can do, but until then there is a chance.
What is the difference between a weather model, a nuclear bomb simulation, and training a LLM?
At the end of the day all these are just calculations, of which you need thousands of processors to do with high accuracy. Pretty much what you're suggesting is a global police force to ensure we're performing the 'correct calculations'. Having to form an authoritarian world computer police isn't much of a solution to the problem either. This just happens to work well in the nuclear world because it's hard to shield and the average person doesn't have a need for uranium.
If we had to have global policing of every large computing cluster and everything that runs there, that does not feel to me like a huge overreach or something that could easily slide into totalitarianism.
It would be better if we didn't need to do this, but I don't see a less intrusive way.
Of course, if you don't think there is a real existential threat then it's pointless and bad to do this, it all depends on that premise.
There is some risk that over time people will be able to do more with less, and eventually you can train an AGI with a few dozen A100s. If that happens I agree there's nothing you can do, but until then there is a chance.
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