alt Hacker NewsThe timing of this is so awfully strange.
However, this U.S. centric view of the future of AI is wild. If the U.S. prevents its businesses from using open-weight models, only those businesses will suffer, while the rest of the world flourishes with the access to cheap, good-enough, intelligence.
Multiple dollars per million input/output tokens was never sustainable for the majority of use-cases - hardly anybody outside the U.S. can afford that and many within it can’t. Models costing that much will find less reasons to be used over time, not more.
All the while their capabilities will continue to shift towards smaller and much cheaper models, at least until we hit some kind of true data limit with them
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We're going to see the battle intensify here because "spikes" of ASI are emerging that can't be ignored. Models are now better than humans in certain domains or for certain tasks, which means capital as a moat is being eroded. This is why you see people like Jamie Dimon sounding the alarm. Most of the talk until now has been about how the models would be a serious problem for labor, but if that was true how could it not also be an issue for capital?
My takeaway is that closed model providers are dangerous. OpenAI and Anthropic are more motivated than anyone to prove that models can be dangerous, and so they will make dangerous models. "Look how dangerous our models are!" No bro YOU are the danger.
Why is it strange? To me, it could only be strange if one was considering that someone planned this, and then yes, it's hard to come up with anyone who would benefit from this. OpenAI looks dumb, but also their models sound impressive, Chinese models look dangerous, but also useful. No clear winner.
Thing is, I don't think anyone planned this, so to me the timing isn't strange at all. The models really were getting close to being able to have a big cybersecurity impact (I started seeing that after teams were reporting their Mythos usage), and an event like this is not so surprising, given that.