Comment by rvz
2 days ago
> OpenAI is considering slowing down the development of cutting-edge artificial intelligence, and the ChatGPT maker’s Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman is hoping that other AI companies will do the same.
They won't. There is no slowing down this development anytime soon and no one will slow down for someone else to surpass them.
They will if it becomes a political issue that causes regulation, which is looking likely.
Geopolitics gets in the way. It is a race between America and China.
There's no way to know what is "safe enough", so you might as well go as fast as technology will allow, and be on the watch out for negative things you can predict specifically and then adapt so as to minimize net negatives.
It doesn't have to be a race, that's just the way we have been treating it so far. There have been examples in the past of civilization ending technology that has been redirected from being a death race (chemical, biological, and nuclear arms in particular.)
7 replies →
Granted I can only read English, but I find that I constantly see this take from Americans and I have never seen anything to suggest that developers and tech leaders in China actually feel this way. But just based on the models that come out, it seems like the Chinese labs - which, funny enough, are less monolithic than the two-man race in the US where the two giants seem to trade personnel regularly - are trying to make smaller, more efficient models rather than building a machine god. To the extent there is an intentional geopolitical angle to this at all, it seems like the US is banking on landing one massive punch - developing a superintelligence and then using it to dominate the world - while China is attempting to sabotage the assumptions that make a superintelligence economically viable.
I am curious what it would look like if the shoe was on the other foot, though. If China had the lead, and Qwen 4 was an Astra class model and the best US model was only as good as Kimi K3, would US commentators call it AGI?
The AI race is caused and being sustained by American tech companies. China is an excuse to keep it going.
if it's a political issue then this is just Sam telling people to do one thing while still riding his SVPs and other leads hard on roadmaps, 'boldness', and delivery metrics
which is to say - unlikely for it to materially slow, only a lot of chirping about slowing down to the public with a couple outlier examples of 'slowing down' they can show publicly
Of course there is a possibility to slow down.
- 1386 employees of frontier labs called for it
- lawmakers are calling for it
- employees are quitting in protest
All it needs is coordination to regulate the pause
I would add that the public is increasingly concerned about AI progress, which will put a growing pressure on lawmakers.
Of course they want the government to mandate a pause. Cutthroat competition is exhausting, and a legally enforced cartel lets everyone lock in their current market share without the pesky inconvenience of competing.
there is no chance, given the strategic implications for war and economics alone, that governments and other private entities are going to stop pursuing this at a breakneck pace
Fatalism is a toxic mindset. Is it hard? yes. Is it impossible? No.
They will if they run out of money to light on fire.