Transcription
Every time I hear a politician talk about AI, I have this cognitive dissonance, and I finally realized why. They totally misunderstand what’s going to happen. I realized this last week when I was listening to the British Prime Minister Keir Starmer announce his new AI initiative.
[Keir Starmer:] “Now this is the global race of our lives. Now some countries are going to make AI breakthroughs and export them, others will end up buying those breakthroughs and importing them. The question is which of those will Britain be: AI maker or AI taker?”
“Put simply, our message to those at the frontier of AI capabilities is this: we want to be the best state partner for you anywhere in the world; that's the measure of our ambition.”
Or this speech by the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen.
[Ursula von der Leyen:] “AI can boost productivity at unprecedented speed. First movers will be rewarded. And the global race is already on without any question. Our future competitiveness depends on AI adoption in our daily businesses. And Europe must up its game and show the way to responsible use of AI.”
Or President Biden.
[Joe Biden:] “AI has the power to reshape economies, government, national security, entire societies. And it must be the United States and our closest allies that lead the way.”
Starmer thinks he needs more AI startups in his country. Von der Leyen wants European companies to adopt AI faster. And Biden thinks that America is leading the way on AI. And they’re all totally missing the point.
Who is leading is not America. It’s some companies registered in America who are in possession of the currently biggest AI models, the so-called “Frontier Models” like OpenAI's GPT, Musk’s Grok, or Meta’s Llama. But these models are not the property of America. They’re the property of some very rich people. Very rich people who are developing systems that in a couple of years will be more intelligent than everything and everybody else on the planet.
The mistake that all these politicians make is to think of AI as a race for profit or prosperity. But this is much rawer. It’s a race for power. Whoever will first be in possession of AI with superhuman intelligence will rule the world. And at that point, it won’t matter where the company is registered, because they’ll have multiple backups elsewhere to avoid a forced nationalization.
Because once governments realize that they are no longer in control, that’s what they will try. But by then it’ll be too late. Those small startups that the UK and the EU are pouring money into have no chance to catch up with the frontier models. We already see now that most of the small apps are instead being built using the frontier models.
So all that money that Starmer and von der Leyen are handing out will just reinforce the power of the frontier models. There might be a few niche applications where this won’t happen, alright, but this will happen for almost all of them.
Why? Because (a) it’s easier and that means it’s (b) cheaper and (c) it will be more user-friendly in the long run. A good way to think about the “frontier models” is as a new operating system. Technically it’s not what they are, but practically, it’s how we will use them.
You will sign up to one of them and use that AI to do everything on your devices. You'll use AI to write your emails, pay your bills, and procrastinate better than ever before. And for governments and other companies, that will become indispensable quickly.
If they don’t sign up, they won’t be able to compete. They will need access for their financial management, military strategies, policy evaluations, everything. Not having AI access in 5 years will be like giving up on the internet today.
And who will control that access? The people who own the companies. If you find that hard to believe, have a guess which AI company made the biggest profit increase in the past year. It wasn’t Google. It wasn’t Meta. It was Palantir.
"The test is you have a computer that can convince you that it's a human being." Palantir is a company owned by Peter Thiel. They provide multimodal AI solutions for data integration and management for large companies and institutions. They did, for example, win a contract to overhaul the data management system of the British National Health Service.
But they almost certainly also have their hands in a lot of intelligence and military organizations. The name Palantir, by the way, comes from the Lord of the Rings trilogy where the seven Palantir are “seeing stones” through which you can watch other people.
Hey, at least Thiel doesn’t leave us guessing about his plans. And this is what the AI race is about. It’s about world domination. Why is Elon suing OpenAI and building his own AI if he doesn’t need the money and has enough on his hands already? It’s because he wants to rule the world.
What sense does it make that Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, declares both that superintelligent AI is going to be super dangerous and that the only way to find out how dangerous is to actually build it? If it’s so dangerous, why doesn’t he worry? Because he’ll be the one in power.
The rest of us will be living in the metaverse, mining bitcoin to pay his energy bills. Now let me return to those politicians. The only government that understands that this is a fight for world dominance seems to be China.
The Europeans and Americans both fail to see the enormous concentration of power that is about to happen in the next few years, in just a few companies. If I was the Queen of Europe, I would take the money which was earmarked for that bigger particle collider, a few dozen billion dollars or so, and instead pour it into a publicly owned frontier model like yesterday.
Because otherwise, Europe will be in even bigger trouble 5 years down the line than it is now. Though if I was the Queen of Europe, that’d be trouble enough already.
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