Probably Dance

The US has been acting powerful recently and it reminded me of this question: What does it feel like to fight against a powerful AI? Not for normal people for whom there’s no difference between competing against a strong human or a strong AI, (you lose hard either way) but for the world’s best humans. We got a sense of the answer before LLMs were a thing, when the frontier research labs were working on game RL:

Fighting against a powerful AI feels like you’re weirdly underpowered somehow. Everything the AI does just works slightly better than it should.

If you’re not a strong human player, the closest feeling is when you play a game with lots of randomness against a really strong player. It will appear as if that strong player just keeps on getting lucky somehow.

I’m getting a similar sense for the recent US foreign interventions and wars. They all seem to work slightly better than they should. It finally clicked for me when Dario Amodei said “This technology can radically accelerate what our military can do. I’ve talked to admirals, I’ve talked to generals, I’ve talked to combatant commanders who say this has revolutionized what we can do.”