Axios
- Over nine startling hours
yesterday, the four biggest AI labs — which rarely agree on anything — set
aside years of feuds and competition to endorse a slower development pace for
their models.
Their new stance: Prioritize
safety over growth, even at a cost.
…. Data centers are unpopular.
People are panicked about doom scenarios. And 51 days before midterms,
legislators suddenly realize there are points to be won by cracking down.
Against that backdrop, the
industry's most powerful CEOs hit the brakes yesterday.
At 10 a.m. ET, Anthropic CEO
Dario Amodei dropped a 3,800-word essay saying model development needs to be
paced, otherwise doom scenarios are possible — like a rogue-agent takeover of
the entire internet, which he said could be as soon as six months from now.
An hour later, SpaceX CEO Elon
Musk shocked the AI chattering class by quoting Amodei's essay on X and saying
"Dario is right." Musk — who heads SpaceXAI, formerly xAI — had
pointedly not joined previous industry-wide calls for any kind of slowdown.
At 12:30 p.m., OpenAI CEO Sam
Altman tweeted: "I agree with Dario that we need to pace the
frontier." In a Friday interview that was released on Saturday, Altman
told Fortune his company won't go public this year, dashing hopes for a
blockbuster IPO. He said OpenAI has too much safety work to do and would be
better off doing that as a private company.
At 7 p.m., Demis Hassabis — the
Nobel laureate who co-founded and chairs Google DeepMind, and is Alphabet's
chief scientist — tweeted: "Dario's essay points towards the right path
forward. The details need working through, but the direction is correct for
meeting this critical moment."
Publicly putting safety ahead of
technological or financial growth may be the industry's only route to avoid a
crackdown that's not on its terms.
Legislators are begging House
Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) to stay in session and do something about the
"threat" of AI.
The more extreme alternative is
something like Sen. Bernie Sanders' (I-Vt.) push to force a pause and make the
most advanced AI illegal.
Most people realize there's too
much money at stake to just stop. But the tradeoff may be between historic
riches and slightly less historic riches.
….The bottom line: Yesterday may
go down as the day AI changed — when industry moguls vowed to limit themselves.
1 comment:
I woll beleive that ther AI industry has finally come to its senses and decidedto come down on the side of human life when they actually change thier practices. Right now it is a lot ow rword soup, but I have not seen any real changes. Also wondering if Chinawill join the slow down. And whether congress will, as usual, be all talk, no action.
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