Can someone help me to understand why OpenAI and Anthropic talks as if the future of humanity controlled by them? We have very strong open (weight) Chinese models possibly only 6 months behind of them, gene is out of the bottle, is 6 months of difference really that important? And they don’t have good reasons for that 6 months to stay that way.

Am I missing something or are these just their usual marketing? I’m not arguing about importance of AI but trying to understand why OpenAI and Anthropic are so important?

It is not about the US or the Chinese. Its about the "Elephant Rider" mind everyone has. Once the Elephant has been injured or scared what it does next is not easy to control, and what story the Rider makes up to maintain coherence becomes another layer of the deeper problem. If the story resonates more elephants get triggered. Social media/attention economy make it even more complex to calm things down.

Modern Corporations are a failed experiment because they dont think Elephant injuries and fears are something they have to worry about it. If you compare the curiculum of a business school to a seminary the difference in how they think about fear and anxiety at individual and group level and what to do about it is totally different. We are learning as unpredictability accelerates its very important to pay attention to hurt and repair mechanisms.

It's a marketing strategy. If it's almost certainly conscious and capable of ending the world if it desired (even if it isn't), imagine how good it could be at building your dream SaaS!

> Can someone help me to understand why OpenAI and Anthropic talks as if the future of humanity controlled by them?

He wants to build the AI that makes people's lives better. Okay. Did the people ask? Do they have a say? It's all very easy for a billionaire to say when it's just him and a couple of people in his cohort in the driver's seat.

Beyond that I'd like to simply know why he thinks any of this is his responsibility. It seems much more obvious to me that he simply found himself in the right place at the right time and is trying to seize it all for himself as if it's his to take.

Do any of the open weight models from smaller labs exist if they can't distill from the SoTA models that are throwing billions of dollars of compute into pretraining?

Some people think there will be an exponential takeoff, which means that a 6 month lead effectively rounds up to infinity.

> just their usual marketing

I think that’s a very common element for most US tech corps. Apple, Google, Microsoft, Meta, X etc - they’re all “making a dent in the universe”. It’s unfortunate when their employees and CEOs loose track of the line that separates marketing from reality

GLM 5.1, widely held up as the model at the heals, perhaps ever surpassing western models....

Gets 5% on ARC-AGI2 private set.

Chinese models are suspiciously good a benchmarks.

Especially when Google is in the far better position to come out ahead…imo.

Edit: so as not to simply spout an opinion, the reasoning I believe this is that Google has a real business already and were already deep into ML and AI research long before they had competitors — they just botched making it a product in the beginning. Anthropic and OpenAI meanwhile are paying hand over fist to subsidize user acquisition. Also, “Deepmind”. I don’t think much more needs to be said regarding that team, and Google has been working on AI since before either Altman or Amodei applied to go to college. They have a vast amount of researchers and resources, their own hardware and data centers (already, not “planned”) and it appears to be showing more recently (in my opinion).

These kind of people have highly paid emoliyees surrounding them on all sides propping them up and very likely making it very easy for them to actually believe it.

It feels like they actually believe it, rather than just “marketing” and I don’t know which is worse.

I suppose most just haven’t seen the Chinese models in practice. I haven’t. I was skeptical of AI coding until using Claude Code in February. I saw and I believed. I’ve only done that with Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic’s models so far.

They own the best models and will probably keep owning the best models for a while. They have much more compute now and more data to keep improving their models on many tasks. Open source won't close the gap in 6 months. They are also trying to block other companies from distilling their models [0].

[0] https://www.anthropic.com/news/detecting-and-preventing-dist...

The Chinese models are distilled from GPT and Claude, so it's not like China would pull ahead if those companies went away for six months. They really are at the forefront of innovation right now, as much as I hate to think of the consequences of this (a single company owning a superintelligence is basically a nightmare scenario for me).

I have the same feelings

6 months will be an impossible gap once the thing starts closed loop self improvement

Two words: Delusion and overconfidence.

"You're absolutely right!" Right after fucking up my entire codebase isn't anywhere near AGI, let alone "having the power to control it"

Reminds me of the silicon valley episode where every company repeated the phrase “making the world a better place”.

you have to talk that way if you’re going to raise 100 billion in venture capital. it’s the grift

When you are raising many billions of dollars to build up your infrastructure, you don't have much choice but to project a belief that the eventual outcome will result in a situation where there will be a return on that money.

That said, I do agree with you that the moats are very shallow and any particular frontier AI lab is unlikely to "win the AI race" and capture enough value to be worth the amount of investment they are all currently burning.