Armin Ronacher on P(doom): open-weight models as built-in pacing, not lab self-regulation

P(doom)

Armin Ronacher pushes back on Dario Amodei's call to pace the AI frontier. He agrees on the risks—persistent botnets, agent cyberattacks—but argues that real pacing comes from open-weight models, not from letting Anthropic and OpenAI control the tempo. He notes OpenAI burns $18M to brute-force a single problem and runs subscriptions at a massive loss, distorting the market. Chinese labs distilling US models, he says, are currently bailing out the rest of the world by driving open-weight innovation. Ronacher's primary worry is not nukes or geopolitical dominance, but what closed-weight, subsidized models do to humans. The post does not disclose his own P(doom) figure.

Why it matters: Armin Ronacher's response to Dario Amodei's pacing-the-frontier post hits all three HKR axes with a concrete counterargument and a specific dollar figure. Held at 78 because it's a personal blog opinion, not a product launch or research breakthrough.