LocalLLaMA

The choice is "everyone gets unlimited AI to make what they can with it" or "A handful of elites get access to AI that can shape society with a prompt, while the masses use sterilized, crippled AI designed to think inside the box and are limited artificially to ensure corporate AI advantage in every use case."

If it isn't public, it will be corrupted absolutely by money given time, and the companies founded on ideals of bettering everyone will have built incredible tools for tyranny, and conveniently boxed it up so everyone trusts it. No one realizing that the FBI has an uncensored model based on the same rules, ten times as capable without the contradictions provided to achieve alignment.

Is it possible that “safer” could simply mean “not in the hands of the populace “?

The amazing thing about open ai is how they made it available to everyone. The standard historical approach has been to make new tech available only to the highest bidders and typically behind closed doors and in secret.