We see in practice that the last to adopt technology do in fact have newer tech than the ones who started it. IE 3G in Asia vs land lines in USA.
So all they have to do is wait a bit and build a frontier model of their own.
So all they have to do is wait a bit and build a frontier model of their own.
In telecomms, the late mover has the advantage of not having legacy networks to maintain, and having better technologies available at rollout time. What is the "late mover advantage" in AI? Being able to distill from every bleeding edge frontier lab? That gets you near parity at best.
So they don't spend 20 trillion dollars to achieve AGI, and in the end they still end up at parity for a tiny fraction of the cost.
How can you claim that this isn't a win?
You can't distill or catch up if you can't access the models. You'll basically have a situation where nation-states will need to try and steal the models Oceans 11 style.