Open Source AI Erodes Closed Frontier Labs But Industry Accelerates
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If Chinese open source completely undermines American closed source frontier lab profitability... the AI industry / research will be fine. It might even accelerate. Worst case... independent frontier AI labs will be (re)acquired by cloud companies who will invest billions into open research and open models to drive cloud spend... because open source models don't hurt the cloud business at all. That cloud spend will continue to saturate because of Jevon's paradox... and AI research will continue to be rate limited primarily by datacenter buildout. The same researchers will largely do the same research they would have done. Lest we forget... all the frontier AI companies were born in a world where open source AI and open research was the universal norm. The models *and* the research were made openly available until things started to close w/ GPT-2. I doubt Anthropic and OpenAI will need government intervention. Worst case, senior employees will make great money on a fine ~exit to the hyperscalers... which will be probably publicly framed as a "reaffirmation of our partnership" to avoid scaring investors / the appearance of a major down round.
Short of government intervention, Anthropic and OpenAI are probably fucked. Personally, I hope the government will let capitalism run its course; if they can’t systematically turn a profit, why should the taxpayers come to their rescue? Neither company has had any respect for the artists and creators whose work they trained on; neither has done anything substantive to address the threat of job loss that they themselves have alleged. Both have acknowledged that their products could cause serious harm to humanity, and persisted anyway. They have been it for themselves. If they can’t make it, so be it.
Research might even go faster. Cloud doesn't have much incentive to keep models or AI research closed because it bottlenecks value creation and thus bottlenecks adoption.
If Chinese open source AI undermines Western closed source profit, USG intervention is too creative. The boring option is cloud (re)acquires AI labs, the same researchers continue... limited only by datacenter buildout. Chinese AI doesn't touch cloud profit. We're prolly fine.
Short of government intervention, Anthropic and OpenAI are probably fucked. Personally, I hope the government will let capitalism run its course; if they can’t systematically turn a profit, why should the taxpayers come to their rescue? Neither company has had any respect for the artists and creators whose work they trained on; neither has done anything substantive to address the threat of job loss that they themselves have alleged. Both have acknowledged that their products could cause serious harm to humanity, and persisted anyway. They have been it for themselves. If they can’t make it, so be it.
If research speed is what you're worried about, I'm not sure Chinese open source rate limiting cloud-independent labs is really that big of a boogeyman.