alt Hacker NewsActually you are wrong. They are only waiting for them to get to the point where they can't push LLMs any further via training and then lobby Governments to introduce safety regulations that they'll adhere to, thereby using safety itself as a moat to block competition (including open weights from other countries, notably China). That's exactly why they are using China as the bogeyman and you keep hearing hysteria about AI labs not pursuing "safety". Safety is going to be the moat that will lock AI into these Big 4 AI labs.
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Who are the Big 4 AI Labs?
To me there are the clear big 2 that actually seem to be innovating and pushing things forward. Meta almost earned a seat at the table with the open strategy then stagnated. Google obviously is the OG but at this point they seem in the same bucket as Amazon and Microsoft as "Big Enough To Matter and Influence Politics and Spend Billions To Hang Around". But they're nowhere near the same tier as OpenAI and Anthropic.
Oh and of course there's SpaceXAI which is Elon's personal money and reputation laundering corporate entity. Elon took over the "king of the reality distortion field" from Jobs as far as the rest of the industry is concerned, so he'll stay first in line for Jensen's chips and investor dollars until he's dead. But as a company what have they actually accomplished besides making the models with the sense of humour and judgement of 14 year old boys?
All regulation works to entrench large companies and keep out competition.
Most of the world trusts the US a little less than China last I checked, and the market caps of these companies only make sense if they can both sell worldwide and also keep ahead of the open weight models (currently Chinese but no guarantee it remains just China).
If (/when) either of those ceases to be true, if they lose out on global sales or if Chinese models catch up, the sector gets a severe downward price adjustment.
It would be interesting to see how it plays out in the long run when it comes to the world dynamics. An important leverage US had was its close relationship based on mutual interest and trust with Europe and other countries which had impact on software sales.