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I'm more charitable. I think they have started to understand that by default, Anthropic will extinguish all their B2B SaaS nonsense like a hurricane extinguishes a candle flame. In this situation there's just nothing to do but give all your money to Anthropic and maybe the upstream supply chain, until Anthropic buys it out. They'd rather maintain some optionality.
David Sacks is now endorsing voluntary slowdown at the top 2 labs.
This seems awfully bullish on Anthropic considering that OpenAI is at their same level, and other labs are only maybe 6-12 months behind.
This is fair, the logic of capability applies to all frontier labs (or more precisely, companies with frontier LLM research and gigawatts of long-term contracted or owned compute, ie OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, xAI). They all will have RSI sooner or later, the first two and maybe three have it already.
The difference is mostly in Amodei's political posturing plus Anthropic's obvious preference to not let others use their best models unencumbered. OpenAI does not have a model stronger than Astra that's ready for general use (they have that monster that proved Navier-Stokes, but it is math-specialized, and internally they still use Astra); the gap between the end of development and general availability is measured in weeks, at most a couple months. Anthropic considers users to be a bootstrapping phase.
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