The governing body is only the western allies. USA + AUS + EU. Or anyone else that may sign a deeply disturbing and restrictive treaty. It's to make sure that the global majority does not make a better model or have access to the same hardware. As is currently the case with embargoes on EUV machines going to China, etc.
Models are not a moat, and I think OpenAI/Anthropic know this. They know that their IPO is being weakened by the open models. Neither is hardware. We are not far from other countries catching up with silicon that matches or exceeds western capabilities, and it will be cheaper.
I think you’re spot on here. OpenAI and Anthropic are burning cash at a phenomenal rate (clearly unsustainable in the long run), but it isn’t clear what the exit ramp is for them. If they stop training and just focus on inference (which they claim is profitable), they immediately fall off the list of frontier models. I’m sure China also sees this and is using state subsidies to fund industry and challenging the West to keep up. This is similar to the way that Reagan outspent the USSR in the 1980s, only now the Chinese are funding it. That said, it’s also not clear what happens if the Chinese models “win” (is that bad?), particularly when all the models get so good as to meet the needs of most applications. Anyway, AI lies at this interesting intersection of both standard technology competition and geopolitical competition.
Models are not a moat, and I think OpenAI/Anthropic know this. They know that their IPO is being weakened by the open models. Neither is hardware. We are not far from other countries catching up with silicon that matches or exceeds western capabilities, and it will be cheaper.