Brilliant! Base model releases are exactly what we need right now. This is the reliable way to do alignment. Releasing the base model then letting everyone on the planet do whatever they want with it is probably what ends up preventing extreme value drift through the intelligence explosion. Millions of people would try to align these base models in their own way, and we'll probably all fail, but those models would drift in different directions so their actions cancel eachother out in the real world. The end result is alignment to humanity's average objective function, at the civilization level. It's a messy but very surefire way to align.
There will still be a different kind of value drift from increasing intelligence itself, but that's unavoidable no matter what we do. Releasing open models slows that down too because it discourages investment in future training runs. And this strategy works unilaterally without cooperation - every open model release slows it down by a little bit. This is the actual way to pace the frontier unlike the regulatory capture stunts Anthropic and OpenAI are attempting while pontificating about their moral superiority.
So, what exactly can a base model do? Is this like the pre-reasoning models that just autocompleted, without any alignment, reasoning, etc optimizations?
I am not sure to follow, why couldn't the vast majority of uses of this base model be nefarious/selfish?
Isn't it like saying "let's give infinite power to all humans on the planet, nothing can go wrong since they define what is humanity" ?
That is the opposite of how alignment works. If even a single group builds a sufficiently capable misaligned AI, we’re fucked
I believe the phrase is “if anyone builds it, everyone dies”, not “if everyone builds it everyone is fine”