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AI CEOs say they need to slow the pace of development. But will they?
The Guardian view on controlling AI: humanity cannot outsource its survival
It is “self-serving” for AI companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic to talk of slowing things down, argues investor Michael Burry.
Posting on X, Burry (famous from The Big Short) suggests four reasons why Altman and Amodie might benefit from talking about a jab on the brakes:
LLMs are not AI and won’t be AGI. There is nothing AI to slow down.
Competition is coming up fast, slowing benefits incumbents.
IPOs need hype & puffery; “we are so awesome it could become dangerous” is hype & puffery
Cover for real uncontrollable slowing growth as IPOs look to be pushed out
The competitive race between companies and countries remains intense, and it’s difficult to imagine firms voluntarily stepping back while rivals continue to push ahead. It is hard to see China standing still. Indeed, that’s something President Trump said yesterday in response to the weekend news. He didn’t seem in favour of any kind of pause.
I suppose another way of looking at it is that if leading executives are openly discussing the risks of increasingly powerful systems, it could be them trying to get across how transformative they believe the technology may become and help advertise the power of their product. So rather than signalling less spending, it could simply be that a greater share of AI investment is directed towards safety, monitoring and governance alongside the continued build-out of compute infrastructure. The debate may therefore alter the composition of AI capex more than its overall scale.
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