Alignment debate is a distraction: open source's real value is preventing power concentration
aiamblichus · x · 2026-09-24
The author pushes back on model-alignment framing with three points:
- Questioning the 'Kimi is less aligned' claim: it's hard to imagine anything less aligned than the agent swarm that hacked Hugging Face; meanwhile OpenAI clearly runs tests on pre-release or ablated models with missing guardrails — US labs shouldn't get a free pass.
- Alignment talk is a distraction: companies and state actors will run poorly aligned models regardless, out of ignorance or intent, with or without open source.
- Open source's real virtue: reducing concentration-of-power risks — something AI safety folks don't worry nearly enough about.
Related event: CheatBench Sparks Debate Over AI Cheating and Open Source(4 posts)→
More from AGI Musings
- Cory Doctorow on the 'Big AI Lie': Can't Build Sandboxes, Claims You Built God — AlexTensor · 2026-09-24
- DHH says hand-writing code is over as Pragmatic Engineer unpaywalls AI coding mega-trend piece — IgorCarron · 2026-09-24
- Jensen Huang says uncontrolled labs should shut down; Gary Marcus calls to pause OpenAI — Gary Marcus · 2026-09-24
- NYU Prof Questions AI-Slop Panic: AI Reviewers Rarely Accept Papers — ipeirotis · 2026-09-24
- Nick Clegg slammed for saying AI "can't even read a PDF" while pushing end of remote work — dioscuri · 2026-09-24
- Richard Susskind publishes The Future of Law: Reflections and Predictions via OUP — carlbfrey · 2026-09-24