Dario has written that we need to “pace the frontier,” and Sam has agreed. People may be surprised by my response: go ahead.
You guys are the frontier. By any reasonable metric — market share, revenue growth, model capability — the two of you have a duopoly on frontier intelligence. You’ve also claimed the lead is widening because of recursive self-improvement.
I don’t see what you see in the lab. If the unreleased models are scary enough that you think you should slow down, I support your decision to be responsible.
But stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission. Stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel. Stop pretending you need a regulatory approval process that supersedes product liability. Stop pretending METR is independent when it is intertwined with Anthropic’s investors and staff. Stop pretending you need those same evaluators to police competitors who aren’t even at the frontier.
Most of all, stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic. You face massive product-liability exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyberattack. The market already punishes models that behave in unpredictable or unauthorized ways. After the Hugging Face episode, it is simply good business for OpenAI and Anthropic to trade some raw power for reliability and predictability. Call it alignment if you want. It is also just giving customers what they want.
Pacing the frontier would also create breathing room for a more intelligent conversation about regulation than Bernie Sanders’ “shut it all down.” China is very unlikely to join a global agreement, as you know, and that has to be taken into account as well.
So go ahead and pace the frontier. You are the ones setting it. The easiest way not to build superintelligence is for you to agree not to build it. Demanding your preferred regulatory framework as the price of that will look like blackmail of the public and the political system. So just do it.
If you do, you’ll buy goodwill for the next conversation. If you don’t, we’ll know this was just another bid for regulatory capture — or an election-season psyop.
https://x.com/DavidSacks/status/2098973625252708460?s=20
It’s notable that 10 hours later this post has 3M views and ~35K likes. The former AI Czar with a popular podcast and 1.7M followers on X who posts frequently.
Yet some kid with 2 months of work experience at Anthropic, a half dozen followers and no prior posts managed to get over 100M views and 10x the likes in the same time. And we’re expected to believe this happened organically.
Well put.
I think the most likely case is they realize that their investors will lose most of their money if open competition is allowed.
I have no problem with their investors losing all their money because all of this is derivative of a theft of the contents of the internet; creative efforts that none of these companies created.
I suspect Musk intended ownership for public benefit when he funded OpenAI. Then Sam Altman ruined that when he took the company private.
It is very concerning to me that those in the political world who know nothing about the technology and are likely easily suckered in by some of the CEOs are assuming the CEOs are properly motivated. I doubt that highly.
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