alt Hacker News> 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?
I'm getting a "gotcha" vibe from how you worded the question, but the answer -unironically - is "Yes." Anyone who is not a closed-weight AIaaS provider[0] will have their lot significantly improved by equally capable, open-weight models.
0. Or their investors. I'm surprised to see Y Combinator signed this letter sering their holding in OpenAI is worth billions and hasn't IPO'd yet. I suspect they crunched some numbers first before signing.
Edit: I realized another group that may be unhappy with frontier open-weight models are those who believe LLMs are inchoate super-intelligences; not only do I disagree with them, but if they are correct, I don't see why we should trust trillion-dollar corporations and their out-of-touch CEOs with that responsibility, when countless CEOs have shown time and time again, that they are not aligned with humanity's interests.
There are two subsets of that group who tend to oppose open weights:
1) The people who think LLMs are "inchoate super-intelligences", but then your argument is entirely correct and they should be happier to see less exuberant development of the things than to make sure the rapid advancement of the world-destroying technology is locked up inside corporate entities that are themselves poorly-aligned. So these people either don't actually exist or are making an honest mistake and should update.
2) Disingenuous sock puppets who pretend to be the first group because they want regulatory capture and know that "we need to regulate this because it's unsafe" sells more tickets than "we need to regulate this to exclude competitors and drive up margins".