If you look at their actions, they're not the actions of someone who both A) believes their technology to be an existential threat and B) doesn't want humanity to go extinct
If they truly believed both of those things, they would just shut down their companies, because being a billionaire is entirely pointless if you're dead.
I can only conclude that they don't believe both A and B. I'm gonna assume they believe B because actually wanting to exterminate humanity is too comically supervillain esque even for Altman. Therefore they must not believe A. And it makes sense. If they believe A, why are they so incredibly sloppy about security? Why did they outsource part of it to some external firm instead of leveraging their own expertise on the technology? I'm not buying it.
Instead, I think they believe C) that AI will create enormous economic value, D) that value will be distributed across the whole economy by making everyone more productive. Assuming C and D, you get E) for them to capture this value, they must maintain proprietary control of the technology in order to be able to charge everyone else for the privilege of using it.
Assuming they believe E, open models are an existential threat, not to humanity, but to OpenAI and Anthropic.
Their solution: make everyone else believe A, in order to achieve regulatory capture and somehow stop open models from advancing by banning their development, or something. This is a hail mary pass. I can just about imagine them achieving this within the US and maybe even Europe, but China? That ship has sailed.
If they truly believed both of those things, they would just shut down their companies, because being a billionaire is entirely pointless if you're dead.
I can only conclude that they don't believe both A and B. I'm gonna assume they believe B because actually wanting to exterminate humanity is too comically supervillain esque even for Altman. Therefore they must not believe A. And it makes sense. If they believe A, why are they so incredibly sloppy about security? Why did they outsource part of it to some external firm instead of leveraging their own expertise on the technology? I'm not buying it.
Instead, I think they believe C) that AI will create enormous economic value, D) that value will be distributed across the whole economy by making everyone more productive. Assuming C and D, you get E) for them to capture this value, they must maintain proprietary control of the technology in order to be able to charge everyone else for the privilege of using it.
Assuming they believe E, open models are an existential threat, not to humanity, but to OpenAI and Anthropic.
Their solution: make everyone else believe A, in order to achieve regulatory capture and somehow stop open models from advancing by banning their development, or something. This is a hail mary pass. I can just about imagine them achieving this within the US and maybe even Europe, but China? That ship has sailed.