I'm not fan of this administration to say the least but assuming they are incompetent is dangerous. Assume they're actually 10-head and ask yourself, what would explain their behavior?
For example, you make an astute observation corroborated by the duration of the ban. Aligning a model is the biggest challenge of these companies, it's unlikely they were able to make a giant leap in alignment capabilities in about a month. You know what is easy to do in a month? Establishing the foundation for digital identity and surveillance.
The government just forced (heavily incentivized) these companies to invest in classifiers and monitoring in a way they haven't needed before. All of this new infrastructure can be used outside the context of the people using language models.
For example, you make an astute observation corroborated by the duration of the ban. Aligning a model is the biggest challenge of these companies, it's unlikely they were able to make a giant leap in alignment capabilities in about a month. You know what is easy to do in a month? Establishing the foundation for digital identity and surveillance.
The government just forced (heavily incentivized) these companies to invest in classifiers and monitoring in a way they haven't needed before. All of this new infrastructure can be used outside the context of the people using language models.