For years now, the major frontier AI labs haveall been actingas if they’re inan all-out, winner-take-all racewith control ofworld-changing machine superintelligence(or at leastmarket-changing artificial general intelligence) at the finish line. This weekend, the industry as a whole rapidly started turning away from that posture, urging coordination on slowing down the development of frontier AI that they say could soon be too dangerous and unknowable to control.
Anthropic’s Dario Amodei was at the forefront of this change in tone, arguingin a nearly 4,000-word essaythis weekend that “we must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models” to avoid “a race to the bottom, spurred by commercial incentives, [that] can make [catastrophic] risks more acute.”
Within hours, other AI leaders were echoing the same call. OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altmanposted his agreement on social mediaand said similar pacing discussions had been taking place at OpenAI. Alphabet Chief Scientist and Google DeepMind cofounder and chair Demis Hassabissaidthat Amodei’s essay “points towards the right path forward,” and renewedhis own recent call for an industry-wide standards body. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadellapostedthat the company “welcome[s] the research, focus, and deliberate pacing needed to get alignment right as the design goal,” ahead of the release ofa lengthy “humanist AI” code of conduct for its models.
Even Elon Musk, whohas been criticizedforhis models’ lax AI safety standardsin the past, linked to Amodei’s essay on social mediawith a simple approving message: “Dario is right.”
Welcome to the brave new world of “AI pacing.”
