“pacing the frontier”
Most of all, stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic. You face massive product-liability exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyberattack. The market already punishes models that behave in unpredictable or unauthorized ways. After the Hugging Face episode, it is simply good business for OpenAI and Anthropic to trade some raw power for reliability and predictability. Call it alignment if you want. It is also just giving customers what they want.
Pacing the frontier would also create breathing room for a more intelligent conversation about regulation than Bernie Sanders’ “shut it all down.” China is very unlikely to join a global agreement, as you know, and that has to be taken into account as well.
So go ahead and pace the frontier. You are the ones setting it. The easiest way not to build superintelligence is for you to agree not to build it. Demanding your preferred regulatory framework as the price of that will look like blackmail of the public and the political system. So just do it.
If you do, you’ll buy goodwill for the next conversation. If you don’t, we’ll know this was just another bid for regulatory capture — or an election-season psyop.
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however I still think Dario & Anthropic pushing for AI safety regulations rn is mostly about money because their upcoming S1 filings are going to show crazy burn rates on compute so calling for safety audits gives them a perfect excuse to freeze spending without looking weak to investors
I see this whole effective altruism safety movement as a new kind of gatekeeping where a small group claims they know what is best for everyone wanting state regulators to lock down model weights & restrict access while calling it public good
I believe open models & sovereign compute will win anyway because intelligence naturally leaks and decentralizes so trying to build a corporate cartel around code just will not work in the long run
whatt makes this even more revealing is the arrogant geopolitical protectionism hidden beneath the ethical theater…
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The Post Labor Day AI Panic Psyop Has Been Launched! Antthropic, Open AI & Goverment are the prime beneficiaries
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I do not support pacing frontier models. If I am going to die at the hands of killer AI, I want it to be American, not Chinese. Buy American, Die American.
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Startup AI companies should be allowed to build AI as fast and aggressively as they can. They should neither confront government-granted protection of big companies, nor should they receive government assistance. They should simply be allowed to compete. If and as startups don’t succeed, their presence in the market will also continuously motivate big companies to be their best – our economies and societies win either way.
Open source AI should be allowed to freely proliferate and compete with both big AI companies and startups. There should be no regulatory barriers to open source whatsoever. Even when open source does not beat companies, its widespread availability is a boon to students all over the world who want to learn how to build and use AI to become part of the technological future, and will ensure that AI is available to everyone who can benefit from it no matter who they are or how much money they have.
To offset the risk of bad people doing bad things with AI, governments working in partnership with the private sector should vigorously engage in each area of potential risk to use AI to maximize society’s defensive capabilities. This shouldn’t be limited to AI-enabled risks but also more general problems such as malnutrition, disease, and climate. AI can be an incredibly powerful tool for solving problems, and we should embrace it as such.
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This is no doubt the asymmetric information Bessent has been alluding to for weeks. There’s going to be a helluva lot of liquidity freed by this move. It’s all going to go flooding into USTs. Happy D day bond guys.
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Translation: our gross margins are getting competed down to 0 by open source models and our capex burn rate is too high.
Let’s maintain our margins with regulatory capture, ban open source models, and slow down the capex arms race. All with a virtue signaling cherry on top.
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So what is really on offer is a quid pro quo. We reduce buildout and the recursive element of our technology (focus more on advances that we control and architecture), and maybe give you a few more chips, and you clamp down on open weight models and bring more of your research in house too.
So perhaps the better way to read it is that this is an outreach to China to get the open weights under control.
