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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 27, 2026

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One angle I rarely see discussed is that open weight models are inherently decelerationist for the frontier.

That is a good argument.

Sadly, I think that the frontier model training is much more driven by people betting on ASI than merely recouping the costs of training GPT 6 or whatever.

Simply earning money with your model is a proposition similar to the concept of the dollar auction -- anyone can come along, invest twice as much money and build a better model which will leave you without any revenue. (Though in practice, I think that the frontier labs might have some secret sauce apart from "just throw chips at the problem" which gives them a moat, but likely a lot less than what Microsoft used to have in the bad old days.)