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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’m glad someone said it! As much as I might believe that there are some highly autistic engineers at Anthropic or OpenAI who don’t care about the money, the likes of Dario and Sam are obviously not in this category. These are business that would love to lock in a duopoly, not charitable organizations.
But a pause lets others play catch-up. "Pause AI" is generally meant to mean frontier capabilities research. If we "max out" AIs at Mythos-level, then it just lets others get to do some catch up.
I think the self-interested economics of a Pause for Dario and Sam is that they get to actually take a breather and make some money off of inference instead of dumping it all into research. But it is still a tradeoff, allowing others to catch up.
I don't think the math works out for that. With current pricing and a duopoly further constrained by pressure from open-weight models, the chances of Fable earning back its investment in a year are slim. It seems likely that investors did not sponsor it because they thought it would directly pay for itself, but because it is a necessary stepping stone on the way to some model which would eventually be massively profitable.
It seems quite plausible to me that Fable was expected to be profitable, and the promised multibillion-dollar capital moat to afford training compute has not held back competitors as much as expected. And Sam, at least, has to make good on his promise to buy all the RAM, cynically I'd say to keep prices high for competitors.
At some philosophical level, it seems worth noting that the real Claude Shannon was effectively "trained" with a much smaller pile of books and a couple decades of a few dozen watts. I'm not convinced training will always be so expensive.
I'm also reminded of the National Ignition Facility, which uses huge lasers for, uh, "fusion research". It was designed at a time when lasers were very inefficient, and we can do much better these days. However, it wasn't built for economical energy production (under 1% laser efficiency) and does make the pulses it needs to, so they have no reason to replace it. If it were a commercial effort for energy production, they'd have lost their shirts to smaller startups with cheap diode lasers (50%+ efficient). Sometimes moats don't work like you planned.
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