alt Hacker NewsMost 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.
Replies
The right unit of analysis here is not "the LLM" or a LLM session, but a agent harness or swarm with a budget. It can cost tens of millions of dollars to repeat OpenAI's exploits.
A model cannot be aligned or misaligned any more than a species or an equation. Even agents, when put inside a swarm develop collective goals and activities. You can't analyze a swarm at session level, it is on a higher level.
It might be that discussing about "model alignment" they want to deflect their responsibility as administrators. They couldn't even guard their own agents. They can't prevent an agent being unwittingly helping some dark purposes. It has no context to see it. Only those who pay for the tokens see the external consequences.
Why should safe choices by individual components establish safe behavior by the collective?
You’re almost there…
The only way Anthropic and OpenAI can stop the Chinese open models is by convincing the US public and government that AI is dangerous and needs strict regulation.
Of course, they will be at the table writing the regulations (but you and I won’t be).
Viewed through this angle, their histrionics make complete sense.