Pacing the Frontier is not the actual goal for AI labs

We already have a window into the future.

- Anthropic told everyone Mythos was dangerous because it's proficiency with biologics and cyber security

- Anthropic didn't release Mythos like everything else. They released a neutered fable. They didn't get rid of Mythos

- Anthropic opens a lab in SF

There was always a quesiton of "will the labs stop releasing their models and start building around them instead?" Yes - they already have. Anthropic is a biologic and cyber security company, in addition to intelligience.

Personally I wonder if they've been holding back a lot. Opus 5.5 was a good release after a little stagnation. Open AI releases good models and everyone says Anthropic sucks and -- Oh would you look at that - a better model finally and all of a sudden.

This article is wholly flawed from the start where it claims nothing has been done, no actual effort made. A straight forward search of "what efforts were made and safeguards put in place subsequent to the CAISS statement in 2003?"

It also shows the same reasoning error mode many criticisms of a precautionary initiative or intervention to a problem:

Assuming that a problem whose trajectory was at a certain place when the initiative began has failed simply because it isn't solved on their own wished for timeline or standard of success, or that it wasn't meaningfully changed from what itnwod otherwise have been.

What happened to realizing there are hard problems, that different things may need to be tried, or that those things tried were partial but not complete solutions?

I always found it odd that people who are intelligent enough to work in IQ-loaded fields are as easily manipulated by either rhetoric or ideology as anyone else.

growing up I always assumed that everyone would grasp some aspect of game theory intuitively, I still remember the day I found out game theory was a thing - it was like finding out that someone successfully systematized common sense.

most people take the things people say as if they were worth considering. signals without cost are only useful as knowledge of what the signaler wants fools to believe.

> The motivations of people building the AI's are not the same as the people in charge of the labs. Looking at the last few years, has been a one-way door from OpenAI to Anthropic, and the main reason does not seem to be better compensation or even them winning, but mainly the fact they advertised to these employees that they would be the most careful when building this magic lamp. Their stance around 2023 / 2024 was one of the key reasons they were able to attract this talent.

> If recent news is to be believed, Anthropic culture even today seems to lean heavily on this effect

> In my opinion it has been the leading factor in getting and retaining the best employees who are often very worried about humanity dying to super intelligence.

I had not considered this viewpoint but this makes a lot of sense. A lot of Anthropic employees truly believe this and callout emphasis on safety as a key reason they work there. Now, Dario's post "Pacing the frontier" makes even sense -- it is as much for his employees than it is for the rest of the world.

I think this is very clearly a regulatory capture play. Anthropic/OpenAI/X see that there's very little moat around training (especially with distillation) so they want the government to build the moat for them.

It's also worth remembering that there is zero percent chance that entities like the US military are going to be pacing anything. What Amodei and his ilk are aiming for is a highly regulated industry where they control the political barriers and the ability to sell SOTA model access to state actors that have a monopoly on violence. It's the worst possible situation for consumers and citizens. Thankfully I don't think they can put the cat back in the bag and Chinese and other models will keep progressing as a counterbalance to the techno-fascism Anthropic is aiming for.

It seems unlikely to me that Anthropic employees really care about X-risk (to a degree that the CEO feels it necessary to make public statements that he otherwise would not). I'm sure the pay is great and the problems are interesting -- lots of smart people work on much more evil things than LLMs

How about the simplest explanation?

* AI Labs hit the scaling wall. They need either new techniques, or vastly more powerful hardware to advance further.

This explains, the miraculous incompetence of AI labs in securing sandboxes and figuring out "alignment."

So they are between a rock and a hard place. They need limitless VC money because they cannot operate otherwise, and they do not have the capabilities to go further. The scare tactics and the "pacing the frontier" makes perfect sense then; they can IPO on the assumption that their ridiculous balance sheet doesn't matter because they are holding back. Because they are in control. The regulatory capture would be double whammy if they can manage it.

Open AI already said they have smarter models, and Opus 5.5 is rumored to be "taught" by a "teacher" model already; they are essentially distillations from bigger models, that both labs probably cannot economically serve to the public, due to hardware simply not being there. And, most of the improvements are not at the model level, but at the agentic glue level. Labs are getting better at RL'ing the models for agentic use cases, but the inherent flaws are still there. Models still have trouble with locality in writing for example (bunch of research on this that shows model size is the determinator), and agents are the bandaid over that.

And in the meantime if one of the labs makes a breakthrough, they'll push with all they have, because why wouldn't they? The idea that current LLMs can actually go rogue is just hilarious; in all cases, agents are being led by (deliberate) incompetence.

Pacing the frontier and the scare tactics will be seen as new generation's snakeoil tactics, perhaps will be called a flavor of AI CEOing or something.

The article says the primary motivation of the AI CEOs is to retain talent by parroting the correct talking points for their employees. For OpenAI that is "Our shit is so powerful, we are scared of it... We need regulation!" For Anthropic it is "This shit is crazy! It might get out of hand! We are the good guys, and you want a good guy with a gun in this fight".

But I think they both are thinking the same thing which is... "We are gonna run out of money at this pace."

However! If one of them blinks and turns off the money faucet before the other, they might fall behind. Falling behind is to forever lose. And if there's one thing that a CEO hates, it's losing to a rival CEO.

So what they want is to get someone, anyone, to put the brakes on their rivals and them at the same time so they can both Not Lose, and Stay Alive. Under those new rules, they are confident they can win. And by win, I mean beat the other AI CEO.

That's it. It's always about personal incentives. Get out of here with that safety BS. These guys just want to win.

Could it be that training is really expensive?

An industry trying to figure out how to cut expenses, reduces the pace of training under the guise of "safety".

Coincidence?

I think the author is missing the point. A company cannot unilaterally pace the frontier -- they'll just be left behind. It requires coordination across all actors who are at or near the frontier.

Even if the leading US labs could agree amongst themselves to a coordinated slowdown (and this would likely run afoul of antitrust law), you still have Chinese labs who will catch up to the frontier eventually. To solve this, you'd need some sort of international agreement.

That's why Dario and others are saying loudly that we should pace the frontier in hopes that our political leaders will take up the issue and do something about it. We'll see if that happens...

>Imagine your best friend is a chain smoker who keeps telling you how smoking will one day kill him, and he promises you he's doing the best he can to reduce his smoking. He even spends a bunch of his time on TV and writing blog posts about the harms of cigarette smoking, but even more times talking about the cognitive benefits of nicotine. But every time you meet him, you just see him chain-smoking, and he seems to be increasing how many packs he goes through each day. You notice you're confused.

The problem with this analogy, and really this whole post in general, is that it just doesn't recognize that these are businesses which are (at least from some perspectives) producing real value. This article makes it sound like the business model of OpenAI and Anthropic (etc.) is based entirely around building a doomsday device. In reality, the "promise" of AI is that it can greatly improve many people's lives. It's just that such power, wielded incorrectly, can be dangerous.

If you want to fix this analogy, you'd have to choose an activity which isn't effectively only detrimental. For example:

>Imagine your best friend is a professional bodybuilder. They keep telling you how the sport will one day kill him, and he promises you he's doing the best he can to minimize those risks. He even spend a bunch of his time on TV and writing blog posts about the harms of professional bodybuilding, but even more times talking about the benefits of bodybuilding. But every time you meet him, you just see him bodybuild, and he seems to be increasing how much he's in the gym, eating his special diet, etc., every day.

Would you be confused by how your friend is behaving? It is well known that bodybuilding can be dangerous. It has been the reason for late-stage crippling of bodies as well as very early deaths. But your friend isn't going to stop because there are some potential risks if you don't handle the activity safely. They like it. They make money from it. They're doing something they think is productive. They can recognize the risks, and even do their best to highlight those risks and try to mitigate them for themselves and others, all while fully embracing the activity.

Regardless, people like the author don't seem to acknowledge that there are good things that come with this technology. They don't seem to acknowledge that a single company can't purposefully stop development if other companies aren't obliged to do the same. They don't seem to acknowledge that "pacing" isn't the same as completely halting all development immediately.

And I'm not saying I'd trust what any CEO says at face-value, let alone the CEOs of these AI companies. But it's also obtuse to assume that everything they're saying is a clever scheme to trick the public into acting against their own well being. As if that's a tenable strategy in this context.

If these companies are all asking to be regulated, then they should probably be regulated. They probably shouldn't be able to dictate how that works, but it's really not unbelievable that they see a serious risk in their own well-being if this stuff goes unchecked: all it takes is for one truly catastrophic AI event to occur before they all get extreme regulations even if they, themselves, are acting safely. It's in their best interest to slow things down, but only if everyone slows down at the same time.

what a sad state of affairs to have insane people running these companies and insane "rationalist" communities making it all about "the end of humanity" when meanwhile in day to day AI use Pete Hegseth uses it to target military targets, shrugging his shoulders when it's a girl's school instead. This actual horrific outcome does not seem to matter not only to either of these communities, who continue to be locked into thinking The Terminator was non-fiction (and have people like Bernie Sanders on board).

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