Should There Be Just One Western AGI Project?

There have been recent discussions of centralizing western AGI development, for instance through a Manhattan Project for AI. But there has been little analysis of whether centralizing would actually be a good idea. In this piece, we explore the strategic implications of having one project instead of several. We think that it’s very unclear whether centralizing would be good or bad overall. We tentatively guess that centralizing would be bad because it would increase risks from power concentration. We argue that future work should focus on increasing the expected quality of either a centralized or multiple projects, rather than increasing the likelihood of a centralized project.