that's pretty damn smart if this was a long-term plan to block competitors
Creating an industry around an elusive concept of safety to force regulatory capture seems pretty straightforward to me.
You don't say "let's ban my competitor".
You say "let's create laws that make it uneconomical for my competitor to access the market".
He rushed past it but he asked something like: if these frontier models are going to be creating so much value, why are they selling tokens and not taking a cut?
It is a very provocative question but it just spilled out of his mouth and then he went on to something else.
The electric company creates the most value. Why don’t they own stock in everything? Why didn’t PC makers take stock in companies that deployed PCs?
It’s silly when you think about it.
Companies look for and seek to maintain competitive moats. This is not particularly clever, it's a core part of corporate strategy.
I definitely believe that (to his credit!) Amodei is a true believer in safety. But I also think it was important for many of the deep pockets investors who have been involved in the company since early on to recognize that this would be a potentially defensible moat.
For instance, Amodei co-authored RLHF in 2017 [1], 5 years before it went on to be used to turn GPT-3 into ChatGPT.
[1]: https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper_files/paper/2017/file/d...
This doesn't even mean that they're wrong about the risks or that they're lying. But surely all the investors understood this factor in their moat.