An accord binds only the labs that sign it while the models it cannot reach are already everywhere. A few days after the closed labs signed a safety accord at the White House, Friedberg said the AI wars have already started. One side wants to centralize and regulate AI. The other knows open-weight models are already everywhere, running on small local machines no agency can reach. You cannot turn them off, and with 197 sovereign countries, no attempt to centralize control will succeed. He compares it to the fight for an open internet: telecoms wanted to charge a toll on access, and with open weights there is nobody to collect it. The labs at the summit were the closed ones. If the open weights cannot be turned off, the accord was a rule for the firms that had already agreed to be ruled.
where there's kind of one side that wants to centralize, control, manage, regulate, whatever the term of the day might be the technology. And there's another side that I think is cognizant of the reality of the technology, which is that it is effectively ubiquitous. We talked about this in the past due to open source open weight models proliferating. The fact that you can run models on small, local machines, that you don't need large clusters to do things. And that we're seeing model after model come out now that are not under the jurisdiction of some centralized system or agency, therefore, it becomes very hard and practically impossible to actually regulate the development of the software. That's the truth. It is what it is, you may not like it, but it is what it is. And those two sides are going to continue to fight. I think that the risks will rise. And as that happens, I'm going to make two predictions to your question. The first one is that I think we will see a massive rise in defense systems. There is no turning off the open source open weight models or shutting down all the data centers or centralizing command and control. There are 197 countries on earth. They each have sovereignty. There's energy everywhere. They're all connected to the internet. Data centers will exist all over the world.
