Is that possible? Has that happened in any other industry?
I can imagine it happening in a single country. But wouldn't research route around that country then? How is the situation in Europe, China, India, Canada, Japan ... ?
It's absolutely happened to the nuclear weapons industry. And Big AI is lobbying for the government to treat AI development the same way it treats nuclear proliferation.
it already does. Stable Diffusion originated at LMU Munich with a lot of non-profit funding, EleutherAI and LAION are non-profit as well I think. The Chinese companies all have their own models anyway etc.
So yes I also find it unlikely. Of course there'll always be one or two players a little bit ahead of the field at any given time but this stuff is almost entirely public research based. These models largely run on a few thousand lines of Python, public data and a ton of compute. The latter is the biggest bottleneck but that'll diminish as more manufacturers come online.