https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/ai-safety-is-not-a-corporat...
The risk is that USA and China will come together on a joint "AI non-proliferation" agreement in the same way that nuclear technology became restricted by the countries that already had the capability. This will lead to a de facto techno-colonization of the rest of the world just between themselves.
This was a topic of discussion at Trump and Xi's AI summit just last month.
One of the largest legal services partnerships here in NL just launched their local DC so they can maintain confidentiality. Do you think they are 'running hobby models on 5 year old GPU clusters in the basement'? Or does a couple of racks of GB300's sound like maybe they know what they're doing after all?
This is all on the horizon. We are only barely scratching the surface and right now it is largely hobbyist having fun with it, but we already see the potential of the AI revolution and where it is going.
If a medium/small country deemed it a threat to rely on US/China for AI capabilities, they can get 95% of the utility by banning all American and Chinese models and just using local ones.
This contrasts to something like oil or nukes, where if you're not one of the countries blessed with them, you have a serious power imbalance.
The economic logic is the same as that of operating systems. AI models are very expensive for one company to make, but lots of companies need them. So companies are better off collaborating on that side of things and competing on something else.
Economically, the AI models that require big servers with lots of GPUs in data centers should likely be more interesting to investors than the AI models that can run on local hardware.
With each query OpenAI and Anthropic get more context about their users. When I compare answers between AIs the ChatGPT answer often includes useful things it inferred from earlier conversations. Losing that context could be a meaningful barrier for a customer to switch to a cheaper service.
Not unless they break their own TOS. The temptation must be very large to do so and is probably why those settings keep mysteriously shifting back to 'yes, I give all my data to you to do with as you please'.