Is military capable AI in the hands of few militaries safer than in the hands of many? Or is it more likely to be used to bully other countries who don't have it? If it is used to oppress, would we want the oppressed have access to it? Or do we fear that it gives too much advantage to small cells of extremist to carry out their goals? I can think of pros and cons to both sides.

>Is military capable AI in the hands of few militaries safer than in the hands of many?

Yes. It is. I'm sure hostile, authoritarian states that are willing to wage war with the world like Russia and North Korea will eventually get their hands on military-grade AI. But the free world should always strive to be two steps ahead.

Even having ubiquitous semi-automatic rifles is a huge problem in America. I'm sure Cliven Bundy or Patriot Front would do everything they can to close the gap with intelligent/autonomous weapons, or even just autonomous bots hacking America's infrastructure. If everything is freely available, what would be stopping them?

Your post conveniently ignores the current state of China's AI development but mentions Russia and North Korea. That's an interesting take. There's no guarantee that we are or will continue to be one or even two steps ahead. And what keeps the groups with rifles you mentioned in check? They already have the capability to fight with violence. But there currently exists a counter-balance in the fact they'll get shot at back if they tried to use them. Not trying to take a side here one way or the other. I think there are real fears here. But I also don't think it's this black and white either.

within a few decades there will probably be technology that would allow a semi-dedicated person to engineer and create a bioweapon from scratch if the code was available online. do you think thats a good idea?

Within a few decades there will probably be technology that would allow a semi-dedicated person to engineer and create a vaccine or medical treatment from scratch if the code was available online. Do you think that's a good idea?

That is a valid thought experiment. I would say it isn't too dissimilar from nuclear weapons. A handful of powerful countries have access to this and any smaller country doesn't. It creates a large separation between 1st world countries and "everyone else".

If you mean US by 'we', it is problematic because AI inventions are happening all over the globe, much more outside US than inside.

Name one significant progress in the field of LLMs that happened outside the US. Basically all the scientific papers came from Stanford, CMU, and other US universities. And the major players in the field are all American companies (OpenAI + Microsoft, Google, AnthropicAI, etc.)

Not to mention access to chips. That's becoming more and more difficult for uncooperative states like China and Russia.

Well, chips needed for AI training/inference are lot more simpler than general purpose CPUs. Fabs have already demonstrated 7nm process with older DUV tech for such chips. They can brute force their way through it – at least for mission-critical use-cases.

https://www.edn.com/the-truth-about-smics-7-nm-chip-fabricat...

Deepmind is owned by Google, but it's British and they've been behind a lot of significant conceptual results in the last couple years. Most significant progress is just "engineering", so it's all done by US corporations.

Other than that there's also things like roformer, but I'm going to assume you won't count that as significant. US universities then certainly don't produce anything significant either though.

> “just engineering”

This tells me the extent of your knowledge about the challenges with these models.