Pacific

From Page 8 wins allegiances.

“The Chinese are involved in the business sector. They’re in the social sector, they’re in the sports, they’re in finance, they’re everywhere,” said Tevita Motulalo, a Tongan journalist who has paid close attention to his country’s foreign policy.

“If they’re trying to take over our country, it would seem to look like that. But we haven’t really crossed any red line,” he said. “Until there are viable alternatives, we need to live peaceably with them.”

The lack of alternatives can be a challenge, with the U.S. openmarket economy making it harder for policymakers to channel investments solely for the purpose of furthering U.S. foreign policy aims.

“They can’t really direct U.S. companies to invest in Tonga,” said Graeme Smith, a professor at Australian National University’s Pacific affairs department who studies Chinese investments in the Pacific. “If the investment isn’t there, they’re not going to come.”

One irritant in Pacific islands’ relations with both Beijing and Washington is climate change: low-lying atoll nations like Tuvalu and Kiribati will be among the first rendered uninhabitable by rising sea levels. And all the countries are facing increased natural disasters linked to warming temperatures, despite having done little to contribute to the problem. Tonga and other countries say they hope to attract more Western investment to adapt to those growing challenges.

Tongan leaders say that they are eager to build deeper economic and security ties to Washington, and that they don’t see themselves as having to choose between China and the United States.

“There’s a whole world that opens up with having deeper relations with America, a greater superpower,” said Fatafehi Fakafanua, the speaker of Tonga’s parliament.

He said he hoped for bolstered cooperation with the U.S. military for improved coastal surveillance as the country faces a growing drug trafficking challenge. Tonga also wants increased investment in infrastructure.

“There was an imbalance in terms of permanent presence on the ground” in the absence of a U.S. embassy, Fakafanua said. “It’s hard to have a relationship when there’s no one to talk to.”

In theory, U.S. diplomats should be arriving to a receptive audience.

“Tonga believes in democracy, freedom of religion. A lot of the same things that countries in the West believe in,” said Cleo Paskal, a Pacific expert and senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “China is not a natural fit. But they need economic development. Otherwise, you end up in situations where you can’t pay your schoolteachers. You don’t have proper health care.”

Still, the job won’t necessarily be a cakewalk, and observers say the Americans have already made some missteps, such as scheduling the official opening of the embassy in Tonga in early May, when the king and other top leaders were in Britain for the coronation of King Charles III. And Tongans will still have to fly to Fiji for most consular services. A senior State Department official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal planning, said that the embassy’s opening date was picked because it was the earliest possible moment to do so, and that a goal over time is to ramp up consular services inside Tonga.

For now, there are only two U.S. diplomats rotating through Tonga, with an ambassador yet to be nominated. The eventual plan is to have four or five diplomats posted there permanently, with a local staff numbering in the dozens.

“How are they going to engage in such a way that is going to be effective and influential? Are they receiving language training, cultural training, so that they can engage with their host governments in culturally contextual, specific ways?” said Anna Powles, a senior lecturer at New Zealand’s Massey University who studies the geopolitics of the Pacific region. “All of those things will determine how effective American diplomacy is going to be in the region. It’s not just about opening up embassies; it’s also about the way in which that diplomacy is practiced.”

From Page 5

Manhattan Project to build a nuclear weapon, or NASA’s efforts to put a man on the moon.

“We’ve managed to do things that people thought unthinkable,” he said. “We know how to do big things.”

Not all researchers agree with the aggressive timelines for supersmart AI outlined at the hearing Tuesday, and skeptics have pointed out that hyping up the potential of AI tech could help companies sell it. Other prominent AI leaders have said those who talk about existential fears like an AI takeover are exaggerating the capabilities of the technology and needlessly spreading fear.

At the hearing, senators also raised the specter of potential antitrust concerns.

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) said one of the risks is Big Tech companies like Microsoft and Google developing a monopoly over AI tech. Hawley has been a firebrand critic of the Big Tech companies for several years and used the hearing to argue that the companies behind the tech are themselves a risk.

“I’m confident it will be good for the companies, I have no doubt about that,” Hawley said. “What I’m less confident about is whether the people are going to be all right.”

Bengio made large contributions throughout the 1990s and 2000s to the science that forms the foundation for the techniques that make chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard possible. Earlier this year, he joined his fellow AI pioneer, Geoffrey Hinton, in saying that he had grown more concerned about the potential impact of the tech they helped to create.

In March, he was the most prominent AI researcher to sign a letter asking tech companies to pause the development of new AI models for six months so that the industry could agree on a set of standards to stop the technology getting out of human control. Russell, who has also been outspoken about the impact of AI on society and co-authored a popular textbook on AI for university classes, also signed the letter.

Blumenthal framed the hearing as a session to come up with ideas on how to regulate AI, and all three of the leaders gave their suggestions. Bengio called for international cooperation and labs around the world that would research ways to guide AI toward helping humans rather than getting out of our control.

Russell said a new regulatory agency specifically focused on AI will be necessary. He predicts the tech will eventually overhaul the economy and contribute a massive amount of growth to GDP, and therefore will need robust and focused oversight, he

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said. Amodei, for his part, said he is “agnostic” on whether a new agency is created or if existing regulators like the FTC are used to oversee AI, but said standard tests must be created for AI companies to run their tech through to try to identify potential harms.

“Before we have identified and have a process for this, we are, from a regulatory perspective, shooting in the dark,” he said. “If we don’t have things in place that are restraining AI systems, we’re going to have a bad time.”

Unlike Bengio and Russell, Amodei actually runs a working AI company that is pushing the technology forward. His start-up is staffed with former Google and OpenAI researchers, and the company has tried to position itself as a more thoughtful and careful alternative to Big Tech. At the same time, it has taken around $300 million in investment from Google and relies on the company’s data centers to run its AI models.

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