One could argue that open source won’t change much with regard to China and Russia.

Both countries have access to LLMs already. And if they didn’t, they would have built their own or gotten access through corporate espionage.

What open source does is it helps us better understand & control the tech these countries use. And it helps level up our own homegrown tech. Both of these are good advantages to have.

That last paragraph is an opinion you seem to have just formed as you typed it stated as a fact that doesn’t seem to hold up to even the lightest scrutiny.

There is no obvious reason they couldn't just train one themselves, or merely steal existing weights given enough time.

That is precious time that can be used to work on alignment.

But alignment is always going to rely on cooperation of users though? What benefit does the delay offer other than the direct one of a delay?

Why is it going to rely on co-operation if users don't have the means to change the model enough to misalign it?

If we're talking about open-source LLMs, among the best embedding, multimodal, pure and coding LLMs are Chinese (attested and not just benchmarks).

They will get it anyway.

What are you talking about use what? It's all in the open already anyway.. And someone like China even has more data to build from

Afaik china is already pretty developed in this area, they already have a bunch of opensource llms that beat ours or at least are at the same lvl. We can also argue that it'll have the same effect as banning chips but again, China succeeded to build dense nm chips even with sanctions, just a bit slower. AI systems are the consequence of the pandora box that we've opened long time ago, about the time when humans got the curiosity to improve things. At this moment you can't stop the progress, the world is myltipolar, there'll always be players willing to go extra so the only solution is getting to the top faster or as fast as others