Author here - thanks for reading and thoughtfully replying

I’d personally love a world where open weights compete with proprietary ones, but I don’t believe it solves the core concentration issue. In that scenario most value still flows to capital holders, it’s just hardware holders not model weight holders.

I emphatically do not want to put the genie back in the bottle nor do I believe it’s possible. Technology has never been restrained for long (export controls on cryptography textbooks in the 90’s comes to mind here)

I also have already personally benefited a great deal from LLMs. I actually frame the entire essay series from this perspective in my prelude essay here: https://www.wysr.xyz/p/a-consigliere-on-every-desk-and-in

However, I believe we may disagree on the definition of a public good. If you’re referring to the free tiers of private models, then I’d argue that unless there is some legal framework passed that forces the frontier labs to offer that to everybody, it’s a customer acquisition cost laundered as a public good. It could disappear at any time and probably will as cutting edge model margins are reduced via competition.

In general, I believe the best AI policy balances allowing for maximum competitive market dynamics while hedging existential economic disruption risk for the general population.

I’ll go into this deeper over the next few essays. Appreciate the feedback