Hmm. So either the weights are open for all to use, or nobody trains those weights at all? Sounds like the ideal outcome to me.
The worst possible outcome is the one where frontier labs train godlike AIs then kick the ladder out from under them. That should be prevented at all costs. No country or corporation can ever be allowed to win the AI race, for technofeudalism will follow swiftly after. As long as they keep competing with each other, we're the winners. If that music ever stops, it's time to watch out.
I'd rather have AIs achieve sentience and wipe out humanity as a whole than live in a world where they submit to the whims of gigacorporations and totalitarian governments for the sole purpose of efficiently oppressing me and keeping me in line while they enjoy riches and freedom I'll never have.
This is precisely what the people worried about AI risk and job displacement want, so they should be strongly in favor of open weights then, right?
I'm getting a "gotcha" vibe from how you worded the question, but the answer -unironically - is "Yes." Anyone who is not a closed-weight AIaaS provider[0] will have their lot significantly improved by equally capable, open-weight models.
0. Or their investors. I'm surprised to see Y Combinator signed this letter sering their holding in OpenAI is worth billions and hasn't IPO'd yet. I suspect they crunched some numbers first before signing.
Edit: I realized another group that may be unhappy with frontier open-weight models are those who believe LLMs are inchoate super-intelligences; not only do I disagree with them, but if they are correct, I don't see why we should trust trillion-dollar corporations and their out-of-touch CEOs with that responsibility, when countless CEOs have shown time and time again, that they are not aligned with humanity's interests.
1) The people who think LLMs are "inchoate super-intelligences", but then your argument is entirely correct and they should be happier to see less exuberant development of the things than to make sure the rapid advancement of the world-destroying technology is locked up inside corporate entities that are themselves poorly-aligned. So these people either don't actually exist or are making an honest mistake and should update.
2) Disingenuous sock puppets who pretend to be the first group because they want regulatory capture and know that "we need to regulate this because it's unsafe" sells more tickets than "we need to regulate this to exclude competitors and drive up margins".
I just don’t buy it. There’s still gonna be demand for stronger models. Sure growth will be slower, but this might even drive a push for more cost efficient training / inference and/or new architectures if money is harder to come by.
It also might end up pushing us towards LLM ASICs assuming the model progress slows significantly.
potential issue is those will be Chinese models if they win, which could be national security matter.
Opening up will make things more efficient and at least give said horseshit capital a chance at being redeployed elsewhere a slightly higher chance of being successful.