To the extent that the OSS companies are keeping up because they are distilling models on the frontier (and I think that extent is quite a lot), you also pause or at least slow them down if the leaders pause. I think having a distilled model that’s 5 months behind the frontier is quite different than a model you trained yourself that’s 5 months behind—doing the same thing will let you catch up with the latter, but not the former.
The world is complicated though so it’s not totally clear what the outcome would be. In the short term, progress from a distilling company would slow down. But perhaps this would force them to invest in actually solving the hard problems, which could elevate them into a real contender in the future. This will certainly take more than a few months, but I’m not really sure how much more, and it depends on other things like access to the best chips.
To the extent that the OSS companies are keeping up because they are distilling models on the frontier (and I think that extent is quite a lot), you also pause or at least slow them down if the leaders pause. I think having a distilled model that’s 5 months behind the frontier is quite different than a model you trained yourself that’s 5 months behind—doing the same thing will let you catch up with the latter, but not the former.
The world is complicated though so it’s not totally clear what the outcome would be. In the short term, progress from a distilling company would slow down. But perhaps this would force them to invest in actually solving the hard problems, which could elevate them into a real contender in the future. This will certainly take more than a few months, but I’m not really sure how much more, and it depends on other things like access to the best chips.