It's genuinely hilarious to me that you immediately proved my second paragraph correct.
Putting arms race in quotes doesn't make it any less real. It just means you wish it wasn't, but don't have any good evidence or arguments to make.
Putting arms race in quotes doesn't make it any less real. It just means you wish it wasn't, but don't have any good evidence or arguments to make.
All you've provided is a shallow dismissal of the idea that they're in an arms race, and then from there declared that their actions and words don't match. Which I agree with, if there is no arms race.
Everything hinges on whether they're in an arms race. I think they are obviously locked in an arms race, both with each other, and especially with China. You're free to continue dismissing it in this shallow way, I don't really care, but I just found it humorous that I talked about how people can't seem to understand the dynamics of an arms race, and then you immediately jumped to an explanation of their words and actions that ignores the idea of an arms race.
So I don't think it's unfair at all to dismiss your theory of an arms race, especially if you can't explain the dangers. Nobody in China is confirming America's super scary AI research, probably because they don't need leverage against the government and global economy. Since we can't see this "safety" research, skepticism is warranted wholly.
Going a step further even, OpenAI and Anthropic can't actually bargain for safety or a research cutoff. The federal government can continue LLM weapons research on their own hardware and employees without any interruption, the commercial outcry is not capable of preventing LLMs from being weaponized. There is no way to convince the CCP to stop closed-door research either. It's much too late to do what OpenAI and Anthropic are suggesting, the only possible side effect of regulation is consolidation (which expressly benefits the hegemons).