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What?
Multiple theories, pick one
First, easy: there is money to be made, so why not try it ?
Second, more elaborated: AI is god on earth (we know that for certain: it has been said); AI will replace all humans in the next 6 month, since 2023; AI somehow sucks (today); Ergo, and this is very logical and the only conclusion, shared by all sane people: "they" are undermining us to rob us from delegating our work to AI (for free, because it costs nothing, and never does); Shame on "them" !
"A single firm is behind OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta hacking scandals"
https://www.effort.news/irregular
However, the Trump administration shot down this idea, with the president himself saying, “AI taking over the World, destroying Humanity, and all other things bad, is a HOAX.”
Wise words as always Mr President.
This but unironically, he was absolutely right here. "Pacing the frontier" never made any sense in the first place.
Ok, here's the argument, as best I can tell:
A coordinated slowdown is anticompetitive because it allows them to reduce their R&D spending without risking their market share, letting them pocket more of the profits.
Each AI company is currently spending $100B+ on R&D every year to beat each other's latest model. By agreeing to slow down model releases, they will be able to cut this spending, allowing them to make bucketloads of money from the models they already have.
The consumer is harmed because they miss out on better models that would have been developed in a properly competitive market.
But that lets companies that aren't colluding to catch up technologically and maybe sell their services for a lower cost. How is that anti-competitive?
They slow down model releases, but don't slow down research and model development. They're not suddenly going to tell their army of researchers to go home. (In fact they can then focus/spend more on research, instead of the engineering needed to keep churning new models for production.)
This protects them from continuous model distillation by inferior models. So they only release a new model when a 3rd competitor catches up to their public production models' capabilities.
And the public gets a new model in 6 months or a year instead of every few months. But the new model would be a (1) gigantic leap in undisputed capabilities, (2) catastrophic in terms of job losses/replacements worldwide and they've had a year to prepare for the politics of it, and (3) the public would have access to the "tiny/medium/..." models while the big money/gov clients get the real super juice hidden behind the gates.
There is little to no political will for preventative measures. Conversely, there is an overabundance of political will to react to disasters.
Thus, there are preventionists whose plan B strategy is to write legislation and wait for a disaster to leverage newfound will to get it passed. Better late than never.
All that said, there's no political will to prepare for the politics of AI. It doesn't exist. The best we can accomplish is to be ready with a plan for when disaster hits.
The frontier labs have dominant market share and distribution. They also have the majority of the compute.
They can make a lot of money by cutting down on R&D and inference costs until competitors can catch up.
They can also buy competitors that catch up.
And if they can get the government to regulate in the meantime, it’s party time for the monopolists!
This is the way the justice system should work.
Now please, go after every FAANG company.