Dwarkesh Patel: belief

Transcript context

…It was also making big advance market commitments. I agree. But fundamentally, it was a private sector-led effort. That was the only part of the COVID response that worked. The project will look closer to Operation Warp Speed. You’ll have all the companies involved in the government project. I’m not convinced that merging is that difficult. You run pre-training on GPUs with one codebase, then do the secondary step on the other codebase with TPUs. It’s fine. On whether people will sign up for it, they wouldn’t sign up for it today. It would seem crazy to people. But this is part of the secrecy thing. People gather at parties and… you know this. I don’t think anyone has really gotten up in front of these people and said, "look, what you’re building is the most important thing for the national security of the United States, for the future of the free world and whether we have another century ahead of it. This is really important for your country and democracy. Don’t talk about the secrets." It’s not just about DeepMind or whatever. It’s about these really important things. We’re talking about the Manhattan Project. It was really contentious initially, but at some point it became clear that this was coming. There was an exigency on the military national security front. A lot of people will come around. On whether it’ll be competent, a lot of this stuff is more predictive. This is reasonably likely, and not enough people are thinking about it. A lot of people think about AI lab politics but nobody has a plan for the grand project.…

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