> it seems their argument is that without an environment that rewards the development of the next frontier model the tech might not evolve as fast.

This is precisely what the people worried about AI risk and job displacement want, so they should be strongly in favor of open weights then, right?

> thus capping how far the tech could reach

I just don’t buy it. There’s still gonna be demand for stronger models. Sure growth will be slower, but this might even drive a push for more cost efficient training / inference and/or new architectures if money is harder to come by.

Isn't that why Americans pay so much more for their medicine and drugs so the rest of the world can get them cheaper.

How about: excellent technology will demand premium prices, and hence will have the capital to back it ... horseshit technology will die a death, and any horseshit capital that backed it.

Opening up will make things more efficient and at least give said horseshit capital a chance at being redeployed elsewhere a slightly higher chance of being successful.

Which is kind of weird, imo. Shouldn't increased competition spur increased investment? If your competitor's product is approaching or beating yours on some metric, isn't the answer to improve your product to differentiate it from the competition? To say that open weight models will stop the flow of capital seems to indicate one of two things: 1) the frontier labs have no idea how to compete, so they are giving up; or 2) they figure that investors will eventually shrug and say "eh, the open weight stuff is good enough, no need to do more research," and retreat from the industry altogether. In the former case, it makes sense to lobby for regulation because the alternative is failure. In the latter, it's an admission that their product has no differentiating qualities from any other in the category and the product is more like a commodity or a utility and not a machine to print infinite wealth.