OpenAI have no moat.

The open source community will catch up in at most a year or two, they are scared and now want to use regulations to strangle competitions.

While their AI is going to advance as well, the leap will not be qualitative as the ChatGPT gen 1 was - so they will lose competitive advantage.

>If OpenAI just wants to prevent another OpenAI eating its lunch, the barrier there is raw compute.

Stable Diffusion pretty much killed DALL-E, cost only $600k to train, and can be run on iPhones.

> Why would OpenAI be worried about new entrants that are almost certainly too small to present a business threat?

Because this is the reason that VCs exist in the first place. They can roll a company with a ton of capital, just like they did with ride share companies. When that happens, and there aren't sufficient barriers to entry, it's a race to the bottom.

OpenAI was the new entrant that almost certainly didn't pose a threat to Google.

This is classic regulatory capture.

> If OpenAI just wants to prevent another OpenAI eating its lunch, the barrier there is raw compute.

FB, Amazon, Google (and possibly Apple) can afford both money and compute resource for that. They couldn't do that themselves probably due to corporate politics and bureaucratic but MS and OpenAI showed how to solve that problem. They definitely don't want their competitors to copy the strategy so they're blatantly asking for explicit whitelisting instead of typical safety regulation.

And note that AI compute efficiency is a rapidly developing area and OpenAI definitely knows the formula won't be left the same in the coming years. Expect LLM to be 10x efficient than the SOTA in the foreseeable future, which probably will make it economical even without big tech's backing.

With browsers now able to access the GPU, its not long until you simply need to leave a website open overnight and help train a "Seti@HOME" for an open-sourced AI project.

> What regulation are they proposing that is actually a serious barrier to making a company around AI?

Requiring a license to buy or lease the requisite amount of powerful enough GPUs might just do the trick

I like that analogy

Then the government should takeover OpenAI

Think most of congress needs help from their grandchildren to use a computer or smartphone, pretty sure they don’t understand one bit of this.