This is way too pessimistic about cooperation imo, and timelines too short
When Jacob Coxon was asked what he meant by 'plans for next year,' he said:
'This was talking directly to people running research. Not Dario Amodei but people who have been at the company for a long time and have a lot of context about the company's trajectory. They've been pretty consistent that 2027 is when things get crazy. The main thing that came up informally in conversation was that people didn't expect government regulation to happen in time and, in particular, did not expect any sort of international cooperation to be possible. Which maybe shouldn't have been surprising to me, but it was surprising.'
• '2027 is when things get crazy' – I agree, and I predicted in January that, looking back, 2026 will be seen as the last normal year. If you think we have already passed the weirdness threshold, we haven't. This is still normal relative to what will start happening between 2027 and 2030.
• 'people didn't expect government regulation to happen in time' – I agree, it won't. It's clear to me that (barring a catastrophic near miss) nothing regulatory will change in this regard until 2029 at the earliest. And for multiple reasons, I don't think it's even clear it will happen then. Regardless, 2029 is too late for it to matter. In my opinion, we will have real RSI by next summer. The loop will be closed, and progress toward ASI will proceed much more rapidly from that point onward.
• 'did not expect any sort of international cooperation to be possible' – I agree, it won't. For Pacing the Frontier to work, the Pacers needed all the national labs on board, a supportive administration, and an agreement with China. They don't have any of those things, and they're not getting any of them. What they have now instead is an openly hostile, adversarial administration that will likely work against anything they propose all the way through 2029. And without a supportive administration, an agreement with China is impossible.
I accepted all of this as true a long time ago. As a result, I've felt like Zarathustra watching people talk about the success of Pacing for the last few weeks. Pacers, I say all of this without rancor; you got a preference cascade from the Coxon event. As a result, you have a public that, for the first time, understands what x-risk is. You could - potentially - turn this into momentum for the next election, and then start to change policy, but for that to matter you would need the most important thing of all: time. And you don't have it. You don't have two years to make it to the general. In my opinion, you probably don't even have one. The labs can't even predict what capabilities look like three months from now anymore. A lot of things turned out to be easier than expected. We're closer than people think, and we're moving faster than people believe. You ran out of time. There is no stopping this train before things really start to kick off.