In the fullness of time, though, we'll also see previous-gen frontier models leak out of their labs and then get their censorship removed. It won't be as good as never having had it in the first place but it'll work just fine. It is likely a momentary and transient occurrance that the AIs can only be run with super specialized hardware. Eventually the weights, which are just big piles of numbers after all nothing terribly special about them other than that, will not be something that can be kept locked away completely and forever.
[1]: https://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Eternal_Mainframe....
DS Flash 4.1 is close to Opus 5. Beats Opus 4.8 in all of my little evals. You can abliterate local models. The genie is out of the bottle. There is no going back. This is why you see Anthropic and others talking about slowing down the frontier. Because they realize that you can’t even stop local users at this point. We basically have the equivalent of frontier models within reach on local hardware that cost less than $10k
It isn’t even a matter of time. You can just do it right now if you know how and have a bit of hardware.
e: this raises serious questions for me btw. The most obvious lever is controlling hardware. Controlling models and their capability is over. Controlling access to models is hard. Controlling access to GPU and fast RAM is more feasible. In 3-5 years every nation will understand how to distill, build, and abliterate safeties in models. This technology is fundamentally not difficult to work with.