Comment by dragonwriter

15 hours ago

The US companies talking about “pacing” aren't actually talking about slowing down their own development efforts, they are talking about slowing down competition. That is, specifically, they are seeking to have government, on the pretext of “safety”:

(1) Give the big AI incumbents an anti-trust exemption so the they can coordinate without it being an illegal agreement not to compete, and

(2) Adopt mandatory supervision (by giving priveleged access to monitors) to the shared safety protocols of the big labs, by a nonprofit funded by the big labs, of everyone training, distributing, or hosting models.

(3) Adopt a policy of seeking international agreements to extend substantially the same rules to foreign actors training, distributing, and hosting models.

The part they are doing voluntarily isn't to promote the lobbying effort for these mandates isn't slowing down, it is giving their pet nonprofit the access for “independwht supervision” of their own operations to their own existing safety rules.

4 comments

dragonwriter

Reply
jcranmer  15 hours ago

I've seen two theories as to what's going on. One is the theory you've espoused, that AI companies are trying to do regulatory capture. The other theory is that they're starting to worry about running out of cash, so they want to do a Washington Naval Treaty-style pause to lower the amount of money they have to shovel at model development to stay competitive.

These theories aren't entirely incompatible with each other, so both could be true at the same time.

  • dragonwriter  14 hours ago

    > I've seen two theories as to what's going on. One is the theory you've espoused

    This theory is just what the AI firms have concretely asked for from government and described themselves as doing voluntarily in the same documents to which people have attributed a commitment to a slowdown based on the titles and non-concrete framing verbiage.

    > The other theory is that they're starting to worry about running out of cash, so they want to do a Washington Naval Treaty-style pause to lower the amount of money they have to shovel at model development to stay competitive.

    That’s not really a different theory as to what they are trying to do, it’s just an explanation that goes one step further as to why they want the government to step in to protect them from outside competition while also allowing them to gorm an agreement not to compete to reduce internal competition in the existing oligopoly.

    The main alternative explanation at the same level is that they are seeing growing threats from good enough foreign/minor-lab/open models, and want to lock in marketshare by excluding competitors, and maybe that’s what you read as implied in my post such that the “running out of money” would be an alternative, and if so you are correct that while they are alternatives, they are not at all mutually exclusive: both can be true (and the emergent competition could partially explain investment drying up, and vice versa via reduced funding making it harder to stay ahead.)