Why Does Ben Affleck Call the Slowdown a Cartel?

Ben Affleck says colluding to manage frontier spending downward creates a cartel. One of the four companies in a frantic race, already at a quadratically increasing spend for a smaller marginal improvement on each model, would feel great if rivals agreed to dump less money in.

He says any view should be heard critically, including the incentive behind it. The businesses have advertised that they must be in charge because the technology is so dangerous it could kill us all. Affleck says the danger pitch is a bad argument. He points to a company that named itself OpenAI to promise open models, then pivoted to a for-profit closed system. He says the pivot probably means the company cannot always be trusted to follow through, because the last move changed 180 degrees. He says the people running the businesses are not demons or evil. They are trying to be successful. Jensen Huang struck him as a really smart, normal, down-to-earth person working hard to keep open models available.

Open models can run on a device now and will increasingly do so, so the massive electricity expenditures and the environmental and cost impacts fall away. Affleck says running one on a 32 gig MacBook Pro, with no inference call sent off the machine, is an efficiency gain that benefits everybody on the planet and democratizes the technology. He is suspicious of the Chinese threat because he does not want the only available models to be closed.