Really enjoyed this read! I think a possible way out of the quandary presented at the end is relying on government intervention — if a government mandates social standards, for instance, then the playing field is more even among competitors and it’s more difficult to outcompete them.

That may not work as well on the international stage. Our GPU export controls will only last so long anyway as China builds native manufacturing capacity.

On the other hand, I think that too much of the debate about AI development treats models like any other ordinary good. But they aren’t. Average people aren’t buying them. They’re barely even useful for the majority of companies, software engineers excepted. We’re all rooting for open weight models right now, in spite of alignment issues, because they resonate with our open-source values and tinkerer spirits. Maybe if domestic models were open-weight and were for the social good we’d be willing to put up with a few points less on SWE-Bench-Turbo-X3.