Why AI Policy Is Hard Even When Everyone Agrees
Prior reading: Competitive Dynamics and Safety | P-Hacking and Benchmarks The Premise The competitive-dynamics post explains why motivation for AI safety is lacking. This post assumes the opposite: everyone is motivated. Every nation, every company, every researcher genuinely wants to regulate AI well. It's still incredibly hard. Here's why. The Object You're Regulating Keeps Changing Capability Jumps Are Unpredictable Regulation assumes you can define what you're regulating. But AI capabilities change discontinuously. A model goes from "can't do X" to "can do X fluently" between training runs, sometimes between scale thresholds no one predicted. ...