This piece originally appeared at Second Best.
Oversight of AGI labs is prudent
1. It is in the U.S. national interest to closely monitor frontier model capabilities.
2. You can be ambivalent about the usefulness of most forms of AI regulation and still favor oversight of the frontier labs.
3. As a temporary measure, using compute thresholds to pick out the AGI labs for safety-testing and disclosures is as light-touch and well-targeted as it gets.
4. The dogma that we should only regulate technologies based on “use” or “risk” may sound more market-friendly, but often results in a far broader regulatory scope than technology-specific approaches (see: the EU AI Act).
5. Training compute is an imperfect but robust proxy for model capability, and has the immense virtue of simplicity.
