The most provocative part of the Dario essay is not the AI capabilities prediction — it is the implicit assumption about who controls the deployment. Every scenario he outlines assumes a small number of labs making decisions about what gets released and when.

That is the real structural question. If AI development follows the pattern of every other transformative technology, the gap between "lab-controlled" and "widely available" closes faster than the labs expect. The open-source ecosystem is already compressing that timeline. The safety framing often functions as a moat — slowing competitors while consolidating advantage. Whether that is intentional or emergent from incentives is worth examining separately.