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Comment by bennydog224 | Hacker News Reader

I agree it’s not all altrusim. It’s a little less clear what you mean at the end though.

For these companies, is your argument that “pacing the frontier” is their attempt to be nationalized and protect their investments?

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Ban non US models and form a cabal, with the blessings of the government. That's what it is looking like, no?

In a world where AI advancement depended only on human ingenuity this would make sense. In that world each political power block would be in an existential race for AI supremacy. In our world compute is the limiting resource. Since the US can control who gets compute, the US already has a defacto supremacy so far as frontier model development. Now if it comes about via human (with AI assist?) ingenuity that compute is no longer a restraint, then the situation is much more dire.

No, my argument is that the need to pace the frontier means they cannot safely advance in capability due to liability concerns. The competition is already almost caught up. If OpenAI/Anthropic have hit an upper bound on safe capability improvement, the gap will close all the way, and we will have reached the full commoditization of LLM tokens very soon.

Say this is true (we are near or at the upper bound of safe capabilities and tokens are commodities). If they successful get regulated, all they’ll get is a little extra time. The market will soon realize this - regulated or not - and pull investment.

Seems like an excessive announcement just to get a little extra time.

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