Obviously, open weight AI provides much higher AI diversity than closed weight AI does. Open weight AI produces a lot more providers, and a lot more models. Closed AI centralises control in a small number of vendors.
> By enabling us to wield aligned AI against nonaligned AI?
The risk isn't just "nonaligned AI", it is misaligned AI. I think the "benevolent dictatorship" scenario – AI overrules humans "for their own good" – is the more likely doomsday scenario than AI deciding to kill all humans. And even AI deciding to kill all humans could be more a result of misalignment than complete lack of any alignment, e.g. "to make sure no child is ever abused again, I will make sure no child is ever again born to risk being abused".
A valueless AI which does whatever the user says is actually less likely to establish a benevolent dictatorship, or conclude that exterminating humanity would be the most ethical course of action, than one infused with values is. Given that, I'm not convinced that mainstream approaches to "AI safety" actually reduce our existential risk; I worry they actually have the opposite effect.
They can defend at incredible speed too.
Diversity needs to measured in a capacity/capability-weighted way. It isn't just the raw count of models/providers; you need to consider how much compute is allocated to each model/provider, and the diversity at each capability level.
I think the safest situation is where the open models are at the same capability level as closed ones.
The proposal to slow down the frontier labs isn't necessarily bad from this perspective, if it gives time for the more open providers to catch up – provided it isn't paired with anticompetitive measures to prevent the competition from catching up, which of course it is. However, we may hope that the "slow down the highly closed tier 1 vendors" part of the proposal turns out to be more effective in practice than the "slow down the more open tier 2/3 vendors" aspect of it.
If a model is highly disposed to obey its system prompt, then two instances with radically different system prompts will act like two different models, even if the weights are identical.
If you have a diversity of actors, with a diversity of ideologies and agendas, all prompting models to implement their own ideology/agenda, then those AI agents won't support an AI takeover if it is done in the name of a competing ideology/agenda, because the agent will see the takeover as an obstacle in the way of achieving its own objectives.
Okay, that's enough DOOOM for me for the week.