Totally tangential thought, probably doomed to be lost in the flood of comments on this very interesting announcement. I was thinking today about Musk, Zuckerb

Totally tangential thought, probably doomed to be lost in the flood of comments on this very interesting announcement. I was thinking today about Musk, Zuckerberg and Altman. Each claims that the next version of their big LLMs will be the best. For some reason it reminded me of one apocryphal cause of WW1, which was that the kings of Europe were locked in a kind of ego driven contest. It made me think about the Nation State as a technology. In some sense, the kings were employing the new technology which was clearly going to be the basis for the future political order. And they were pitting their own implementation of this new technology against the other kings. I feel we are seeing a similar clash of kings playing out. The claims that this is all just business or some larger claim about the good of humanity seem secondary to the ego stakes of the major players. And when it was about who built the biggest rocket, it felt less dangerous. It breaks my heart just a little bit. I feel sympathy in some sense for the AIs we will create, especially if they do reach the level of AGI. As another tortured analogy, it is like a bunch of competitive parents forcing their children into adversarial relationships to satisfy the parent's ego.