They do want my business, it's an official OpenAI market. The gate isn't "we don't serve you", it's "pay for the model that may target you, but not for defensive purposes". And without a single policy document stating this, it's just a surprise gate in some random verification flow step with no explanation or appeals.
As for why they should they care, maybe they shouldn't. But then they should say which one is it, they can't care and not care at the same time.
OpenAI's own safety argument for Daybreak is that defenders need access to Critical-level models because attackers route around gates. The case for releasing Astra at all stops making sense when the gate does precisely the opposite of that.
OpenAI itself is saying plainly, that "We don’t think it’s practical or appropriate to centrally decide who gets to defend themselves. Instead, we aim to enable as many legitimate defenders as possible, with access grounded in verification, trust signals, and accountability.".
And yes, there are competing models, from China. Except OpenAI wants these models to not be accessible either.
OpenAI can pick one of two:
(a) Critical-level cyber capability is dangerous enough that access must be decided by who you are and what you do, in which case the gate has to actually look at who I am and what I do, say what the criteria are, and let me contest a wrong answer. That's their own stated policy.
(b) Access can be decided by a country code in a random dropdown, with no criteria published, no review, and no one at OpenAI able to say why - in which case drop "democratized access" and "clear, objective criteria" from the marketing, and say plainly that some passport holders don't deserve to have access to defensive capabilities.
It's not unrealistic. Several Chinese companies seem to be close behind. People thought they would never catch up to the US car industry and now look what happened.
Frankly, the US car industry hasn't set the bar very high. They were not very innovative in the last couple of decades. I think the European industry is a better benchmark, and even then the result is pretty clear.
To the best of our knowledge, these Chinese companies rely on distillation of frontier models by OpenAI and Anthropic, which isn't a method available at the frontier itself.
I'm not really convinced that there's much secret sauce here, all the methods and data are public, the only real difference is how much compute it takes.
All the methods and data are not public. We don't know what unpublished methods they're using. You can get most of the pre-training data publicly but they've probably spent a ton of money curating it and are now doing things like buying rare books. The RL training data is all (/mostly) proprietary though, and that's the real secret sauce part.
All the RL data are exactly public. There are huge amount of distilled data freely available, and that amount is more than enough to train a ~10T model.
There are 'transfer stations' and that's how exactly I use GPT and Claude in China. OpenAI and Anthropic do not sell in China, so we use their AI with a much lower price like 1% of the official API price. The largest transfer stations have TBs of traffic every day, and the traffic is eventually possessed by the open source community.
Subscription engineering is a deep field. Neither OpenAI nor Anthropic have any technical advantage in this field.
everybody do be cooking with water.
Chinese Labs provided pretty good, primarily cost-reducing techniques, like the sparse attention patterns recently.
I'd bet OpenAI and Anthropic use their variants of those too, so they can get greater margin on their tokens - not something they'd really want to / need to self-report.
Where does the secret sauce show up in the outputs, then?
Like, (apart from tone), I find it hard to distinguish between the outputs of GPT/Claude/Kimi/GLM recently (I use cursor, and have been giving them the same prompt and comparing).
If anything, I found that the non-Claude models were better in many cases, which definitely doesn't map to their pricing.
> in fact not all the methods and data are public
Probably not, but unless you work at a lab, I'm not sure that anyone can say (and if you do work at a lab, you should not be replying on this thread).
