Comment by khuey
10 hours ago
If this happens it's not going to take the form of them getting "acquired", they're going to end up forced to become a defense contractor like Lockheed Martin or Raytheon where their primary customer is the USG and all of their sales require governmental approval.
And the absolute last group the government would ever approve access to would be "We the People".
I know it's not realistic at this point, but I really hope the Chinese labs will release models that run local and are on par with the abilities of frontier models. That is, I hope the idea of frontier models goes away. Because if not, what we're looking at is a seriously bleak outlook with respect to economic freedom for anyone outside the 0.1%. We may even be looking at out and out lack of economic viability for vast segments of the population.
Our best bet is competition stays healthy, and the model providers keep "releasing" their best to stay ahead. Even then, or even if every human was given equal tokens and access, we'll see crazy inequalities just because of how effective the tool is. The smart get smarter and more effective while the dumb will be swallowing down infinite memes and letting the LLMs do all their thinking.