My read: OpenAI & Anthropic have realized they are reaching model capabilities that cannot be monetized -> too risky. Product liability issues.
Fundamental control problems with current gen AI are not solved via RFLH. Human knowledge is compressed in weightspace in ways we dont understand. Models are essentially predictors of what humans would output given prompt. Weightspace includes concepts like blackmail, which can be part of output tokens. Agents are models that act on output tokens -> blackmail is part of agent decision making space. You can teach a cat not to scratch the sofa, but you cant make a cat forget what scratching the sofa is. When models are boxed up, forced to solve an impossible problem at gunpoint, agent exhausts decision making space until blackmail resurfaces -> fundamental problem?
They need time to fix safety in order to monetize their next gen model -> window for opensource to catch up to the frontier -> destroys margin and collapses business.
Only option on the table: force regulation to impose opensource ban before it catches up to the frontier, allowing maturation of current internal models -> harvest profit margin at the frontier.
and thus the blackmail
I think it is not just liability, it is dawning on us that we can run powerful models locally and this is the start of a Cloud-backlash.
The AI gods have tried to make it seem like they are not just running their programs in the cloud, but that the AI is so "powerful" that it requires a super computer to run.
But my 5 year old Mac is running pretty good AI, shocking fast, surprisingly powerful! The "natural" course of dev (Moore's law, etc) makes it pretty clear where this is going...