One possibility is that they're counting on another bailout package like the banks and others got in 2008.
The bets are absolutely huge and have been spread throughout the financial system via securitization. If the number does not continue to go up, a lot of people are going to find themselves backing their numbers with money that simply isn't there anymore. Therefore, the number will continue to go up and we (meaning American taxpayers) will back whatever it takes for that to happen.
Now, were the bets stupid to begin with? Of course. Who wants a machine that potentially unemploys major percentages of the population? No one. But the bets were made regardless, and then more bets were made on the hypothetical returns of the first round of bets, and so on and so on.
How are Point 1, "We should not sell powerful chips or chipmaking equipment to China," and Point 2, "We should crack down on industrial-scale distillation operations," addressed by making open-weight models illegal?
Point 1 is about restricting the sale of chips, not models. Point 2 concerns companies using closed models to train their own models through distillation.
The real issue is that open-weight models can run on much less powerful hardware, making the current AI business model, where companies train a powerful model and gatekeep access to it, less relevant. Once open-weight models become good enough, much of the future revenue for today's leading AI labs could disappear. But just as Microsoft still has a market so will the large AI houses have one, but the moat will not be providing AI responses.
The blog has it's own comment section under the article that's completely blank and yet clearly there is a lot of interest with 197 comments. Having an empty comment sections sends the wrong signal.
