Sam Altman calls for pacing AI development but promises rapid progress will continue

Sam Altman is doubling down on his call to pump the brakes on AI, at least a little. He wants a uniform, nationwide safety framework for advanced AI but says the industry shouldn't wait for lawmakers, even though international coordination needs U.S. government support. To that end, OpenAI now sets explicit safety protocols before training runs that could bring major capability jumps, and Altman hopes other companies "will learn from our approaches and propose their own." He also makes clear that "pacing" doesn't mean "stopping." Progress will "continue to be" rapid, just not as fast as it could.

Pacing will be well worth this cost; no amount of American competitive pressure should justify recklessness, or let capabilities get ahead of alignment and monitoring.

Sam Altman, OpenAI

Over the weekend, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, former Deepmind CEO Demis Hassabis, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, and Elon Musk all backed better-controlled AI development. According to The Information, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google have been talking for months about self-regulation through an independent oversight body. Smaller players like Cohere worry this could turn into a cartel.

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