Cartels survive only if they are aligned.
There is no way Elon, Zuckerberg, Altman, and Amodei would ever agree on how AI should be deployed, scaled, and affect society. Their disagreements would lead to a crab-bucket outcome, rather than a shared acceleration outcome imo.
Also it is better if there is a public company at the frontier, at least I can invest in it, rather than 1000x gains going only to early employees and VCs who got in when the public couldn't
You are forgetting how powerful aligned incentives are. If their interests align, they will find a way to reach an agreement.
They are plenty of things they can still align on that will benefit them all, e.g. banning open-weight Chinese models.
Elon is renting Colossus to Amodei, so there is some agreement.
> There is no way Elon, Zuckerberg, Altman, and Amodei would ever agree on how AI should be deployed, scaled, and affect society
Why? They're business rivals, but when the best business strategy becomes to work together, I'm sure they can put name-calling side. They all agree on the core idea: that their AI will run the society, bedroom to battlefield. That everyone will be the consumer of tokens and rely on AI for all consequential decisions and work, and that big tech companies should be the stewards of this technology, helped by the government.
Their vision is that they're the future kings of the world. I'm sure the throne is big enough for more than one person.