scraping CoT won't stop the advance of Chinese models. neither will a US "ban" on using such models. at this point I'm cheering for DeepSeek or Qwen to catch up to Anthropic. I support anyone who releases open weights.
having open-weight models allows users to use/modify them in novel ways.
I don't trust Dario Amodei, Sam Altman and Elon Musk to act in my best interests. Closed models will have an incredible centralizing effect, and concentrate power like we've never seen since the feudal ages.
If you want to see what it's like for the economy to collapse into a single, extremely valuable commodity, under the control of a small elite, look at Saudi Arabia.
also, I just value freedom tremendously. I want to tinker with model weights. I want to build my own stuff. I don't want to sharecrop in someone's walled garden.
I also worry a great deal that OAI and Anthropic will bow to political pressure and make Claude and ChatGPT push certain political agendas, to report biased information, or refuse to help with legal requests that conflict with corporate values. I also worry about privacy and mass surveillance - chat logs are far more intimate than my search queries or selfies.
I also just don't think the open source movement has much chance of competing with the city sized data centres owned by Anthropic and OpenAI, or the hundreds of billions of dollars they have available to hire the best researchers. It costs hundreds of millions to train a frontier model, this kind of compute isn't available to the open source community.
Especially drugs- I used to think all people should have access, but overall I really wish meth just never existed and people wouldn't distribute it outside of specific circumstances. Being able to cause irreparable damage in one moment of weakness is terrible for people who have less control, and for society as a whole really.
I strongly recommend open-weight wherever you can. assume any data you pass to a closed model (including opinions or political positions you intimate) will be retained and analyzed in unfriendly ways, either now or ten years from now.
