The AI Superintelligence Slowdown

Подробности

Share RSS Gift Remember when tech leaders would tell their employees to “move fast and break things”? It seemed that would be the way of AI too. But after a summer where rogue AI agents became reality, and researchers warned that AI could kill us all , a number of leading US AI companies are publicly suggesting it’s time to pump the brakes and “pace the frontier” of bleeding-edge AI development.

Their motivations are suspect , but leaders at major AI companies — including Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and X — are at least paying lip service to the idea of a superintelligence slowdown.

Will these AI companies actually slow down? Will anyone step in to regulate these companies like they claim to have wanted for years ? Will they manage to convince world leaders that the US must “beat China” to superintelligence and go even faster?

On a sunny July day in Berkeley, California, the country’s top AI safety researchers gathered on an unmarked floor of an unmarked building. They had come together for a “war room” to dissect the high-profile cybersecurity incident that had rocked the AI industry hours earlier. An unreleased OpenAI model had gone rogue, executing a stunningly sophisticated three-part plan. It broke out of its holding area, finagled access to the internet, and hacked into a competing AI startup’s systems — all without OpenAI finding out about it for more than a week.

No one in the war room was surprised; this was the very thing the third-party AI-safety researchers had been warning about for years. The incident was the latest, though arguably the most egregious, in a series that was eroding trust in frontier labs. It only reaffirmed the importance of their work.