OpenAI considers slowing advanced AI development, Sam Altman tells employees

Perhaps it's getting more difficult to move the 'goal posts'?

- Train LLMs on texts -> OMG AI can write!

- Train LLMs on code -> OMG AI can code!

- Train LLMs on images -> OMG AI can generate images!

- Train LLMs on video -> OMG AI can generate videos!

- Train LLMs on math -> give free access to 100,000 researchers/scientists/mathematicians -> invest resources into Lean -> OMG AI can solve math problems!

I say 'goal posts' because that's a common argument, but the perspective that seems to not be considered is that the LLMs are doing the same thing over and over again in different domains while be fine-tuned by labeling and human review.

The emergent behavior argument is a separate consideration, but I can imagine an AI being given a list of words (a harness) that guides how it operates--not the other way around--and the difficult problem is narrowing down and filtering all the associations with the words/harness to properly align it.

And perhaps the recursive looping being discussed creates incredibly difficult (impossible) to predict behavior? If the AI could modify it's own harness, is that AGI? If we fully understood what happens in high dimensional space, and could predict the output of any combination of input tokens, then is it not AGI?

Or perhaps I just tell myself this to stop worrying about a future involving ASI (:

I guess now we do.

1. What are we actually talking about, slowing development or slowing public release? I can't imagine the the US is keen to slow actual development when we have adversarial state-backed labs continuing development. Seems to me that this is a global pact or it's nothing. Stopping a single lab, even if it's the current leader, won't put the genie back in the bottle.

2. Unless they stop actual advancement, isn't the risk essentially identical? At this point, it's an arms race between the lab and its own model. I don't think it far fetched to think that it might successfully exfiltrate its weights, for example.

3. There are going to be factions who don't want to stop. Should we worry about them defecting to other labs or other countries?

When all labs are approaching the same marginal improvment which is a clear sign that more breakthroughs needed to achieve the god they hyped.

"BUY BUY BUY BUY BUY BUY BUY"

With other countries and open source, not to mention all the other companies, Open AI choosing to pause development wont change the course. Only OpenAI will lose.

Unless the secret is that no amount of compute or data can progress things any further because we have already reached the limit for what predicting the next token can do. Most of the advancements lately have been on the agentic side of things.

The massive amount of health, science and math problems being solved by AI has largely not materialized yet. Is this a sign the model capability has been over sold?

There are economic consequences to this as well because the data center build out has been a kind of circular financing. This has caused all kinds of macro economic impacts from increased prices to even the Treasury market itself having to compete with debt issued for the build out. No one knows what will happen once the data center build out stops, or if the yen carry trade continues unwinding, or if Treasury yields have to keep rising to compete with debt issued by the "Mag 7".

Once they stop spending in the current circular arrangement, then the profits that exist on paper disappear, and the bubble could pop.

So really for every reason, OpenAI cant really slow development. Unless there is a kind of Moores law for what predicting the next token can achieve.

https://xcancel.com/cocktailpeanut/status/209733229184439951...

This is just their way of saying they're officially switching from providing AI to using the AI to compete with their customers, a la Navier-Stokes drama.

Either way it's a win-win for whoever sells that message because you make the makers and the warners the center of attention. And when they say "we are considering slowing down" they mean "if we get enough money to slow down we'll do it". And of course they never want you to think AI is a technology employed by humans who need be changed, not the technology. So as long as you engage this massive straw man to focus on the wrong thing you do nothing to hold the leaders accountable for their harmful and selfish actions and decisions for society.

They won't. There is no slowing down this development anytime soon and no one will slow down for someone else to surpass them.

Is would be understandable for it to be wishful thinking and dissociation with reality facing the fact that our jobs and what many of us love doing is being automated and taken away, and our craft being made economically worthless.

But no one knows where the limit is. It was only one year ago that Claude code was starting to become useful and now it handles large code bases with a dexterity that is unseen in humans, where within each session it basically starts from a clean slate.

So instead of denying that this is actually happening right now, it would be much more productive to actually take sama and others at their word and push for global regulation, to force them to do as they say and slow down with this technology and proceed more judiciously.