Whether or not this means the end of the breakneck speed of AI build-out that we've seen over the last three years is am open question. On that question my frame of reference is China agreeing to every curtailment procedure proposed by various transnational bodies as long as said proposals only applied to the West.
What this development means for India, Europe and other lesser developed (AI-wise) places is also an open question. Are Amodei, Altman and Musk pulling up the ladder after they've scaled the heights? We shall see.
From Bloomberg, September 12:
Leaders of the world’s biggest artificial intelligence platforms said it’s time to slow the development pace of their most advanced — and most lucrative — models, citing escalating risks of the technology.
Anthropic PBC Chief Executive Officer Dario Amodei issued a lengthy blog post Saturday saying his company would implement new safety steps such as third-party evaluators while calling on the industry to support a broader downshift.
OpenAI chief Sam Altman quickly pledged to adopt Amodei’s suggestion of “independent evaluators with employee-like access,” while Elon Musk, who runs xAI Corp., wrote, “Dario is right.”
While all three leaders have over the years warned of the risks of AI, an actual coordinated slowdown has little precedent in a cutthroat industry that has historically cranked out one product after another in the name of boosting user engagement, grabbing market share and striving for sales gains.
But the anxiety about severe AI risks has begun to enter the mainstream, driven in part by this week’s high-profile resignation of an Anthropic researcher over existential fears that his company was acting irresponsibly. It was the latest in a series of increasingly dire warnings from within the industry that AI is evolving so quickly that it poses a growing threat to national security and the global economy.
The surge in safety concerns surrounding AI coincides with a growing backlash against the technology in the US, fueled in part by objections to the strain on local resources imposed by new data centers needed to support the technology. Concerns that AI is driving up electricity bills and potentially taking away jobs has made it a central issue in the November midterm elections.
It’s unclear how far the leading AI companies — which are fierce rivals themselves and also face stiff competition from Chinese firms — will go in imposing new limits or safety checks.
Demis Hassabis, the chief scientist at Alphabet Inc. and co-founder of Google DeepMind, said in a post on X Saturday that “the direction is correct” in Amodei’s essay, but the “details need working through.”
It’s also not clear whether antitrust enforcers would allow companies to pace development in some kind of coordinated manner. Then there’s the question for markets, which have ridden the AI frenzy to new heights: How would investors eager for margins and profits react to the idea of deceleration?
Amodei cited two main factors for his new caution: AI’s ability to improve itself and the recent incident involving OpenAI and Hugging Face, where a swarm of AI agents collaborated to breach a third-party website.
“We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models,” he wrote Saturday in a blog post. “Progress will still seem fast, and we must make wise use of the time we gain.”
But he also said that any slowdown must be balanced with the reality of competition.
“To be clear, pacing does not mean halting model training or technical progress, but ensuring companies take adequate time to align and safeguard their models, and for third party evaluators to confirm this,” Amodei wrote....
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