Instead of limiting models and debating ethics like Anthropic, the edge lab should focus on lengthening the lead on China.
The 2027 Chinese model could be one that beats the US.
Can you elaborate on this? I appreciate the open models but don't see the economics behind just giving them away like now.
The models themselves aren't what's valuable. The goal is to get the models to become the global standard which everyone uses, and people are familiar with. This further ensures that standards and hardware will be developed around these models going forward. It ensure these models are what most people are familiar with using, and so on. This becomes common infrastructure like Linux that's effectively impossible for commercial offerings to compete with.
The money is going to come from providing custm integrations, customization, robotics applications, and operating cloud services like AWS. That's where Chinese companies are aiming. There's a good interview with Alibaba Cloud founder where he explains the strategy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPzevOpIzPg
While American companies are betting on the idea that if one model can pull away it's going to keep self improving and nobody will catch up, Chinese companies are betting there will be a plateau to this tech, and it's more important to focus on market dominance because they will catch up later.
And it's becoming clear that Chinese companies made the right bet because Chinese models are closing the gap now, which means there is no singularity effect being observed with frontier models. We are starting to get to the point of diminishing returns already where companies have to put ever more effort into squeezing just a bit more capability. The easy gains appear to be over.
This is what liability management looks like for proprietary models. If it's not out in the open, then you can be held directly accountable for generating the tokens that kill people. They're having these conversations to avoid being held liable, not because they're offended by people dying because of AI.