The Danger of Internalization
OpenAI and Anthropic are now rolling out new frontier labs in a "slow and staggered" way. Since Mythos, we've been at the beginning of the end of public access to frontier intelligence.
How do OpenAI and Anthropic stay in business? Obviously they need to keep developing frontier intelligence models. But they will no longer be able to share these with the public in general. Right now it's "slow and staggered", but as capabilities increase, there are many reasons to expect rollout will be limited to a small number of trusted parties.
Under this new regime, the economic benefits will be internalized by the labs and their trusted parties.
And those trusted parties will make a lot of money.
But the public is neither stupid nor optimistic. The public's sentiment toward AI is already cartoonishly negative. If they begin to see large corporations and the government (who else are the trusted parties by default?) accruing all the economic benefits, while they worry about losing their jobs and their entire way of life -- now you have a big political problem on your hands.
The anti-data-center protests are nothing compared to what we'll see if the general public -- yes, literally everyone except the few trusted parties -- feels threatened in this way.
At least while frontier AI models were made publicly available, there was a perception of some fairness, an equality of access to opportunity. I doubt this would go on forever -- winners do eventually crystallize and moats emerge -- but it would last a few years, and those optics really matter for the transition period!
Internalization the way it has been forced puts us in a tradeoff between safety and political/economic inequality. While I understand the motivations for safety, the latter seems like a powderkeg.
I have no prescriptions, only observations. None of this is easy.