Earlier quoted context omitted.
> has no moat I would love to see someone try to escape with a copy of openai's raw unaligned base model
There is no need for a copy. If another can do most of what OpenAI/Anthropic can do at a fraction of the cost (like the Chinese models) then the moat evaporates.
the capability gap is underestimated. the raw unaligned base model from a pretrain is like the telemetry recorded from a particle accelerator - it's hugely valuable and not just because of the cost sunk building a collider.
the things are kept under air-gapped national weapons grade security measures not because it's literally going to escape and threaten the world but because if somebody walked out the door with a copy they would have everything. the capabilities we see at the surface are mostly the result of mining the great unknown space and attaching feeble control surfaces, ablating/lobotomizing dangerous areas, and fencing off illegal/secret/embarrassing ones.