This accomplishes two goals that AI Frontier Labs have a vested interest in:
1) Blocking further AI development by competitors, and-
2) Blocking the ability for outsiders to truly discern AI capabilities.
I mean, just think about the past few years of FUD about AI from the Frontier Labs themselves. They claim to use AI to write the code for AI, but then also don’t let other people do the same and make the claims impossible to independently verify. They claim AI is improving itself, but don’t let other people use AI to improve their own AI tooling. They claim AI is this great automation engine, but then block self-bootstrapping from AI in favor of selling tooling.
It’s all smoke and mirrors and lies and deception, disguised as risk management. Truly excellent and advanced AI doesn’t need human-created harnesses and scaffolding, because it shouldn’t have a problem bootstrapping its own as needed. It should be able to coach users how to setup something similar at home. It’d be researching its own improvement in distillation and resource consumption so it could run in more places, and thus improve faster through different evolutionary lines. That’s the narrative these labs sell, but trying to accomplish it on your own with their tools results in stern rejections and claims of breaching “Terms of Service”.
If AI boosters really believe in the power of LLMs and Generative AI, ya’ll gotta start calling out hypocrisy from the frontier labs every time it happens. They aren’t building world-changing AI, they’re building products, with all the restrictions and hostility of Big Tech.