If people are genuinely concerned about lack of access to the OpenAI models then work at training open ones!
OpenAI has a maybe 6 month lead and that's nothing. Plus it's much easier being the follower when you know what is possible.
(To be clear, I know at least a few of the projects already working on this. I just want to make it clear that is the intellectually honest approach).
Perplexity AI's app is definitely better than GPT 3.5 for many things although it isn't clear how they are doing everything there.
That's simply not true. Nobody would have gotten where GPT is today without transformers. That's not a trivial bit of insight anybody could have had. Stopping research funding and publications will prevent rapid evolution.
Rapid evolution is well underway. Lone individuals are able to push the envelope of what's possible even with just a new basic interop, maybe in an afternoon. It's much too late to be discussing things like moratoriums.
Maybe such things could prevent emergence when the basics don't exist yet, but not when we're all already walking around holding a capable factory in our hands and can create a new product line in a few lines of Python.
Yes, plenty of low hanging fruit around; Heck, I can probably literally ask chatGPT to implement for me a few ideas I've got.
OTOH, I've known since secondary school of two distinct ways to make a chemical weapon using only things commonly found in normal kitchens, and absolutely none of the post 9/11 aftershock attacks that got in the news over the next decade did anything remotely so simple, so that example makes me confident that even bad rules passed in haste — as many of them were and remain — can actually help.
(And that's despite my GCSE Chemistry being only grade B).
Clearly, it's a very hard problem with massive uncertainties. But we can take actions that will significantly decrease the risk of utter catastrophe.
I don't even think world-ending catastrophe is that likely. But it seems a real enough possibility that we should take it qeriously.
The risks need to be discussed and understood, along with the benefits, and publicly. That's the only sensible way forward. Denying that the technology is here already and pretending it can be "paused" doesn't assist in alleviating their concerns.
It's absurd to think any of it can be put back inside the box it came out of. Now that it is here, how best to mitigate any bad sides it may have? Simple, continue to develop it - as it will be the only viable source of effective counter-measures.