“The Game Board has been Flipped: Now is a good time to rethink what you’re doing” by Alex Lintz

Cross-posted on the EA Forum here

Introduction

Several developments over the past few months should cause you to re-evaluate what you are doing. These include:

1. Updates toward short timelines
2. The Trump presidency
3. The o1 (inference-time compute scaling) paradigm
4. Deepseek
5. Stargate/AI datacenter spending
6. Increased internal deployment
7. Absence of AI x-risk/safety considerations in mainstream AI discourse

Taken together, these are enough to render many existing AI governance strategies obsolete (and probably some technical safety strategies too). There's a good chance we're entering crunch time and that should absolutely affect your theory of change and what you plan to work on.

In this piece I try to give a quick summary of these developments and think through the broader implications these have for AI safety. At the end of the piece I give some quick initial thoughts on how these developments affect what safety-concerned folks should be prioritizing. These are [...]

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Outline:

(00:11) Introduction

(01:24) Implications of recent developments

(01:29) Updates toward short timelines

(04:29) The Trump Presidency

(07:37) The o1 paradigm

(09:27) Deepseek

(12:11) Stargate/AI data center spending

(13:15) Increased internal deployment

(15:47) Absence of AI x-risk/safety considerations in mainstream AI discourse

(17:17) Implications for strategic priorities

(17:21) Broader implications for US-China competition

(19:36) What seems less likely to work?

(20:59) What should people concerned about AI safety do now?

(24:04) Acknowledgements

The original text contained 6 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
January 28th, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ynsjJWTAMhTogLHm6/the-game-board-has-been-flipped-now-is-a-good-time-to

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.