First, I have to say I loved your thoughtful & detailed comment. You have clearly considered this from the financial side; let me add some color from the perspective of someone working with frontier researchers.

> As the "alignment" folks on the AI industry are likely to learn

I will push back here. Dario & co are not starry-eyed naive idealists as implied. This is a calculated decision to maximize their goal (safe AGI/ASI.)

You have the right philosophy on the balance sheet side of things, but what you're missing is that researchers are more valuable than any military spend or any datacenter.

It does not matter how many hundreds of billions you have - if the 500-1000 top researchers don't want to work for you, you're fucked; and if they do, you will win because these are the people that come up with the step-change improvements in capability.

There is no substitute for sheer IQ:

- You can't buy it (god knows Zuck has tried, and failed to earn their respect).

- You can't build it (yet.)

- And collaboration amongst less intelligent people does not reliably achieve the requisite "Eureka" realizations.

Had Anthropic gone forth with the DoD contract, they would have lost this top crowd, crippling the firm. On the other hand, by rejecting the contract, Anthropic's recruiting just got much easier (and OAI's much harder).

Generally, the defense crowd have a somewhat inflated sense of self worth. Yes, there's a lot of money, but very few highly intelligent people want to work for them. (Almost no top talent wants to work for Palantir, despite the pay.) So, naturally:

- If OpenAI becomes a glorified military contractor, they will bleed talent.

- Top talent's low trust in the government means Manhattan Project-style collaborations are dead in the water.

As such, AGI will likely emerge from a private enterprise effort that is not heavily militarized.

Finally, the Anthropic restrictions will last, what, 2.5 more years? They are being locked out of a narrow subset of usecases (DoD contract work only - vendors can still use it for all other work - Hegseth's reading of SCR is incorrect) and have farmed massive reputation gains for both top talent and the next administration.

This is an interesting perspective. What happens if there is a large global war? Do researchers who were previously against working with the DoD end up flipping out of duty? Does the war budget go up? Does the DoD decide to lift any ban on Anthropic for the sake of getting the best model and does Anthropic warm its stance on not working with autonomous weapons systems?

I don’t know the answers to these questions, but if the answer is “yes” to at least 1 or 2, then I think the equation flips quite a bit. This is what I’m seeing in the world right now, and it’s disconcerting:

1. Ukraine and Russia have been in a skirmish that has been drawn out much longer than I would guess most people would have guessed. This has created a divide in political allegiance within the United States and Europe.

2. We captured the leader of Venezuela. Cuba is now scared they are next.

3. We just bombed Iran and killed their supreme leader.

4. China and the US are, of course, in a massive economic race for world power supremacy. The tensions have been steadily rising, and they are now feeling the pressure of oil exports from Iran grinding to a halt.

5. The past couple days Macron has been trying to quell tension between Israel and Lebanon.

I really do not hope we are not headed into war. I hope the fact that we all have nukes and rely on each others’ supply chains deters one. But man does it feel like the odds are increasing in favor of one, and man does that seem to throw a wrench in this whole thing with Anthropic vs. OpenAI.

> researchers are more valuable than any military spend or any datacenter. It does not matter how many hundreds of billions you have - if the 500-1000 top researchers don't want to work for you, you're fucked; and if they do, you will win because these are the people that come up with the step-change improvements in capability.

This is a massive cope imo. The reason that the AI industry is so incestuous is just because there are only a handful of frontier labs with the compute/capital to run large training clusters.

Most of the improvements that we’ve seen in the past 3 years are due to significantly better hardware and software, just boring and straightforward engineering work, not brilliant model architecture improvements. We are running transformers from 2017. The brilliant researchers at the frontier labs have not produced a successor architecture in nearly a decade of trying. That’s not what winning on research looks like.

Have there been some step-change improvements? Sure. But by far the biggest improvement can be attributed to training bigger models on more badass hardware, and hardware availability to serve it cheaply. To act like the DoD isn’t going to be able to stand up pytorch or vllm and get a decent result is hilarious: the reason you use slurm and MPI and openshmem is because national labs and DoD were using it first. NCCL is just gpu accelerated scope-reduced MPI. nvshmem is just gpu accelerated scope-reduced openshmem.

If anything, DoD doesn’t have the inference throughput requirements that the unicorns have and might just be able to immediately outperform them by training a massive dense model without optimizing for time to first token or throughput. They don’t have to worry about if the $/1M tokens makes it economically feasible to serve, which is a primary consideration of the unicorns today when they’re choosing their parameter counts. They can just rate limit the endpoint and share it, with a 2 hour queue time.

The government invented HPC, it’s their world and you’re just playing in it.

> Generally, the defense crowd have a somewhat inflated sense of self worth.

/eyeroll but nobody can do what you do!

that is considering if there will be elections, which many people don't believe it's the case.

reminder that trump has been flirting with just continuing in power (2028 hats and talks about a third term) and is responsible for trying a coup last time he lost.

personally I think there's a possibility where he'll just declare martial law and stay in power at the end of his term.