I totally agree, I think it would be ideal if we could freeze progress right here and get 5 years to adapt to even just having GPT-4 around.
BUT
We can't do that. Even if the US and EU did some kind of joint resolution to slow things down, China would just take it as a glowing green light to jump ahead. And even if through some divine miracle you got every country onboard, you still would have to contend with rogue developers/researchers doing there own thing (admittedly at much slower pace though).
So while I agree on pumping the brakes, I also don't think there is a working brake pedal, or the cooperation necessary to build one.
China got embargoed on high end chips, though. (Very wise decision in hindsight.)
So, if the embargo is enforced properly, it seems to me, that this would make it very difficult for China to leapfrog us on AI, if we push the breaks for a bit.
Well, if the US was serious about pulling the breaks on AI research they could use export controls of advanced chips on any country they don't trust to align with them on the AI front.
They are already doing that, there are only a few places in the world where you can fab advanced chipsets, and China is assuredly working on that. But from a practical point of view, what stops a research group in China having a server farm in Virginia or Italy or Indonesia? It's not like nuclear weapons simulation where the input data is super secret, they can do 99% of the training on a commercial system.
BUT
We can't do that. Even if the US and EU did some kind of joint resolution to slow things down, China would just take it as a glowing green light to jump ahead. And even if through some divine miracle you got every country onboard, you still would have to contend with rogue developers/researchers doing there own thing (admittedly at much slower pace though).
So while I agree on pumping the brakes, I also don't think there is a working brake pedal, or the cooperation necessary to build one.