Comment by dragonwriter

> 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.)