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Notes -
Is There Real Anti-Trust Risk From A Coordinated AI Lab Pause?
In AI-pause discussions it is increasingly common to hear the "anti-trust" objection. The idea is that if the labs were to coordinate a pause in frontier AI development, this would be a "conspiracy in restraint of trade" and therefore illegal.
Putting aside the question of whether it is ethical to risk a double-digit chance of destroying the world in order to avoid getting sued (it isn't), is this even a realistic possibility? My impression is that anti-trust law in the United States is legitimately quite fuzzy (as the NCAA is currently discovering).
Putting my cards on the table, I think this argument is cope. The labs want to pretend that they want to pause, but they don't actually want to pause. "If she wanted to, she would," etc. Just today, Anthropic put out a new statement containing the following sentence:
It seems like every time I read a statement from them, they've added more and more qualifications. Are they going to keep racing until congress passes a specific anti-trust exemption? That arguably seems like what the word "lawful" is implying.
Perhaps I am too cynical but the call for government coordination seems like an obvious attempt to build themselves a moat in a largely moatless space. My own experience has been the cost of model switching is near 0. Approximately all the agents, skills, whatever I've used in my job work pretty seamlessly for any of the underlying models. Some have their quirks but essentially all of them are good enough.
"We the current frontier mousetrap makers think it should be ILLEGAL for anyone to build a better mousetrap faster than we can, for the good of humanity."
I agree that model-switching is rather painless for users, and that there is a lot less vendor lock-in for LLMs than it was for traditional software mongers.
I see the AI labs more in the role of the x86 CPU vendors. From what I can tell, AMD and Intel did not have a hard duopoly. If Elon Musk or Peter Thiel had wanted to get into the CPU market in 2005, they could have set up a credible third alternative -- they might have had to pay for licence costs, but if Intel had demanded prohibitive costs, that would have invited the eye of the regulators.
On the other hand, the upfront costs in cutting-edge CPU design are so high that some startup will very likely not eat the lunch of the established players. And given that the x86 architecture was effectively a duopoly, it seems likely that their margins were not absurdly high. Funding a third competitor was obviously not seen as a simple and riskless way to 10x your capital investment.
The same is true for LLMs, only the barriers to entering the cutting edge market are much higher than for CPU designs, far beyond the ability of Thiel or Musk to just force their way into the market through massive spending.
There are two ways Anthropic could make money of Pause AI. One is simply hyping up their model -- "Mythos is so smart that it is almost an x-risk" or something along the lines. The moat thing seems more far-fetched, IMHO. As I mentioned, the barriers to the market are massive. It is not like a dozen startups in the US are currently training Mythos-sized models and would eat Anthropic's lunch in a few months without intervention.
Also, it seems unlikely that China would agree to any pause which effectively lets OpenAI and Anthropic pull up the ladder behind themselves. Thanks to Anthropic, we have some idea what Mythos-sized models can do, and a good understanding that they are not ASI. We do not face the NNPT situation where the peoples who have the bomb decided to make it illegal to get the bomb.
Instead, the year (or whatever timespan) of pause would allow competitors to catch up to the forerunners. Likely their stranglehold on the GPUs would lessen -- hard to motivate investors to buy you fancy toys when the one sure-fire path to earn money from them is blocked to you. The only way it would pay off for Anthropic would be if it lead to aligned ASI which would reward Anthropic shareholders for their pro-social behavior in an acausal trade.
I’m sure it has been mentioned before, but Anthropic and OpenAI benefit merely from advocating for a pause: it gives the impression their models are powerful and they care about safety (at a cost they persuade the government to regulate against their wishes).
to quote @quiet_NaN:
This was not what the GP was suggesting, though.
I am also not sure that it is a great strategy to succeed. What the AI labs mostly need is money, which will mostly come from smart investors. They are less likely to be interested in how much xrisk agony the labs show and more interested in what their products can actually do.
Though I concede that xrisk concerns can totally fuel AI hype in non-obvious ways, Eliezer probably sped up the development of AI by a year.
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