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Comment by an0malous

1 day ago

The one where it’s infeasible that a company that needs to live up to a valuation of like 5% of US GDP but is still burning cash and has no moat would willingly decide to slow down the pace of development of their core technology

> has no moat

I would love to see someone try to escape with a copy of openai's raw unaligned base model

  • There is no need for a copy. If another can do most of what OpenAI/Anthropic can do at a fraction of the cost (like the Chinese models) then the moat evaporates.

    • the capability gap is underestimated. the raw unaligned base model from a pretrain is like the telemetry recorded from a particle accelerator - it's hugely valuable and not just because of the cost sunk building a collider.

      the things are kept under air-gapped national weapons grade security measures not because it's literally going to escape and threaten the world but because if somebody walked out the door with a copy they would have everything. the capabilities we see at the surface are mostly the result of mining the great unknown space and attaching feeble control surfaces, ablating/lobotomizing dangerous areas, and fencing off illegal/secret/embarrassing ones.

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  • I expect they are slowing down in an attempt to keep from having those models improve to the point where they can effectively escape unassisted into the wild.