OpenAI and Anthropic unite against open-weight AI risks to their bottom line

Yep. Growing up, I always defaulted to the "enlightened centrist" perspective that antitrust law and IP law and trade law were failing to help the median person simply due to the difficulty of the problem, that insofar as our regulation was inadequate it was inadequate because it had to balance multiple crossed incentives and stay ahead of world class sprinters who had a systemic resource advantage because the economy will always be larger than the regulators. But the more I learn about the history of these subjects the more I realize that the levers were understood, they did work, and that the present outcomes were entirely intentional.

Reagan and the Chicago school intentionally shifted antitrust and IP law into monopoly mode (Bork and Bowman+Posner). The Consumer Welfare Standard is an obvious fig-leaf over Robber Baron talking points as defeated earlier by Brandeis, the Nine No-Nos (lol) indicate that the failure modes of modern IP policy weren't just understood but contained, and then containment was turned off. Trade is a messier story but Triffin articulated the distributional problems in the 60s so nobody gets to claim ignorance.

The bad news is that there is more corruption that I thought, but the good news is that the problems are more solvable than I thought.

I don't think it's ever a good idea to change the rules of the game in order to stay competitive.

In recent years, with US further turning their back from globalization into America first protectionism, the rest of the world is getting increasingly tired and slowly de risking out of US products and tech.

European companies are either suffering us levies, or us interference with whom they can conduct business with, or consistently risking that their service and cloud providers can become liabilities over night.

EU is also strongly pushing for US alternatives in payments, telecoms, space, etc. And I didn't even mention politics yet.

US is still enjoying an apex position, but it may overestimate its gripe and underestimate resentments (Greenland threats have been a point of no return).

The actions of US looks like those of a decaying empire.

What plays in US hands is that its biggest "allies" are mature democracies, and mature democracies really procrastinate any painful change unless they have to confront it, thus it may keep getting away with this for very long.

How can distillation be considered IP theft, when IP theft is the defacto method in how the closed-weight models were trained?

My bet: Thanks to China, compute gets cheaper, models get better, both economically and qualitatively, and AI becomes increasingly commoditized rather than controlled by a select few.

If I wager on anything else, it won’t matter, because it would mean living in a dystopian hell where any bet is meaningless.

Please explain how making it difficult to start a business and hire employees protects people. I've never understood that logic but maybe I'm missing something.