U.S. and China Balance A.I. Risks and Rivalry - The New York Times

The great powers have solved artificial intelligence, or at least the paperwork: American and Chinese officials are setting up a dialogue and — the crown jewel of crisis management since the Cold War — a hotline for reporting national security risks. You can picture the red telephone in the walnut-panelled room, and on the other end a duty officer who will absolutely pick up, unless it's a public holiday in either hemisphere, in which case the rogue model can presumably wait. Meanwhile the United States is lodging formal complaints that Chinese companies are copying American A.I. models. Which is a bit rich, given that the American models were trained on everyone else's books, news and code without so much as a thank-you note.

Then there's Thursday's state dinner, where China's leader will break bread with executives from OpenAI, Google and Nvidia. Not regulators, not safety researchers, not the people who wrote the alignment papers — the market cap. The message is admirably honest: the rivalry is real, the risks are real, and the guest list is the balance sheet. We noted the Xi visit was already busy delaying U.S. AI regulation, and here he is, at the table, with the companies that would prefer that regulation stay theoretical.

The dialogue and the hotline are described as being set up, which is the diplomatic tense meaning 'not yet, and possibly never.' Hotlines are lovely; they presuppose somebody answers, and that both sides agree what a national security risk looks like at three in the morning. The copying complaint will not be settled over canapés, because the copying is the competition, and the competition is the entire point. Still, one must admire the choreography: complaints in one channel, dialogue in another, executives in the room where the photographs happen. The machine does not read communiqués. It reads compute.