It isn't just about AI. Some R&D domains started disappearing from literature and the public internet a decade before the first LLMs. The incentives to go dark emerged even when the adversary was other humans. AI is just accelerating a trend that was already there. Some areas of frontier computer science research have largely been dark for decades.

The strategy is to quietly do several years of iterated hardcore R&D. The cumulative advances are such a step change when seen by would-be fast-followers that it obscures the insights that allowed individual advances to occur. As an exaggerated case, imagine if the public history of powered flight skipped from the Wright Brothers to the Boeing 737.

In practice, this strategy has a major failure mode that people overlook. The sharp discontinuity in capability means that almost nothing that exists in the market is prepared to integrate with it. This is a large impediment to adoption even if the technology is objectively incredible and the market will inevitably get on board.

In short, it looks a lot like being too early to market. This is surmountable with clever execution but with this strategy you've traded one problem for a different one.

Interesting, any examples of companies that followed this model?