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thenewnewguyyesterday at 7:06 PM0 repliesview on HN

I would not consider myself an expert on LLMs, at least not compared to the people who actually create them at companies like Anthropic, but I can have a go at a steelman:

LLMs allow hostile actors to do wide-scale damage to society by significantly decreasing the marginal cost and increasing the ease of spreading misinformation, propaganda, and other fake content. While this was already possible before, it required creating large troll farms of real people, semi-specialized skills like photoshop, etc. I personally don't believe that AGI/ASI is possible through LLMs, but if you do that would magnify the potential damage tenfold.

Closed-weight LLMs can be controlled to prevent or at least reduce the harmful actions they are used for. Even if you don't trust Anthropic to do this alone, they are a large company beholden to the law and the government can audit their performance. A criminal or hostile nation state downloading an open weight LLM is not going to care about the law.

This would not be a particularly novel idea - a similar reality is already true of other products and services that can be used to do widespread harm. Google "Invention Secrecy Act".