Will the US Government Control the First AGI?—Finding Base Rates
Overview
This research is exploratory and doesn’t aim to provide precise probabilities. This piece is most useful for other researchers, rather than people interested in bottom-line conclusions.
In order to forecast whether the US government (USG) will control the first AGI, it is useful to learn from historical trends in who controls important innovations. This could take the shape of a base rate, which one can then improve upon using considerations specific to the case of AGI.
I define ‘control’ as roughly the US government’s ability to take at least 50% of important development and deployment decisions.
Learning from historical cases is difficult because their similarity to AGI and their historical circumstances vary widely. In this piece, I explore how to do this well by constructing a base rate and exploring four factors that might suggest significantly changing this base rate:
Whether the base rate of USG-controlled innovations has declined over time
Whether the US share of global R&D activity has declined over time (as another proxy for whether USG-controlled innovation has declined)
Whether the base rate of USG-controlled innovations is significantly different in war/cold war than in peacetime
Whether the base rate of USG-controlled innovations is significantly different for billion-dollar technologies than less expensive technologies
I find that factors 3 and 4 are most important to inform forecasts on USG control over AGI.
Findings
I estimate a naive base rate of 28% for USG control over important innovations.
I use historical case data on innovations and who controlled them collected by Bill Anderson-Samways. This data includes 27.5 important innovations, such as the computer and the first synthetic virus, spanning the years 1886 to 2023.
My data is of a limited sample size and has some flaws. My use of this data should be viewed as making exploratory approximate guesses. This is more useful as input into further research than to form immediate conclusions.
(Factor 1) I could not find a clear decline in USG-controlled innovation over time.
This question may be asked because the huge USG investments in the Manhattan and Apollo projects seem to lack an analog today. But, plotting my limited case data, I could not see a clear downward trend in USG-controlled innovation over time.
(Factor 2) I only found an uncertain, mild decline in the US share of global R&D activity.
I further investigated claims of declining USG-controlled innovation by investigating whether the US share of global R&D activity has declined (as a proxy).
Using R&D funding data starting in 1960, I only found a fluctuating, mild decline in the US share (could be 5-10 percentage points) that could be confirmed with more and better data.
(Factor 3) USG-controlled innovation may be 1.8x more common in war/cold war than in peacetime.
In my case data, the fraction of USG-controlled innovations during war/cold war is higher than in peacetime. I estimate base rates of 35% and 19% respectively.
To illustrate what this means for AGI, I estimate the base rates of USG control in example cold war and peaceful scenarios at 30% and 20% respectively.
(Factor 4) Billion-dollar innovation projects may be 1.6x more commonly USG-controlled than less expensive innovations.
GPT-4 cost $780 million in hardware and models continue to scale. AGI might be more similar to other high-cost inventions rather than, say, low-cost academic research.
I estimate USG control base rates for billion-dollar innovations compared to less expensive innovations at 38% and 24% respectively. I counted innovations as high-cost if their cost as a fraction of GDP at the time would be above a billion dollars using the same fraction of today’s GDP.
If one puts three times more weight on high-cost cases, the overall base rate of USG control over innovations becomes 31%.
An Aside: USG-Controlled Innovations May Be Completed by a Contractor in Only 22% of Cases.
Contractors are often involved in USG-controlled innovations. This is relevant since it may lead to a different governance structure with the USG having less unilateral control.
But I estimated that only 22% of USG-controlled innovations were brought to their final completed form by a contractor, meaning that most of the time, the USG is the only actor immediately capable of producing the final technology.
Our 2024 Research Fellow Luise Woehlke researched together with her mentor Christian Ruhl on how involved the US government may get in the development of AGI.
