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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.
The way it is right now is to build giga-monster models, use those internally to boost yourself, and distill them down into lighter consumer models.
Apparently OAI is already building GPT7 and GPT8
with how much competition, benchmaxxing, and increased compute for inference, I can't imagine that they are intentionally nerfing their own public models for any reason other than that they can't figure out how to package it into something the public can use. The training data for all these frontier models goes well into 2026 at this point.
Yes, both labs already have monstrous internal teacher models they don't sell for inference, this is generally acknowledged. They cut releases for the public just to keep revenues growing, it's not their actual frontier.
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 world is not full of idiots, rather communication channels are heavily managed to prevent people from establishing consensus around the obvious.
No matter how many people think press release X is obviously wrong - 80%, 95, 99% - it'll always be "the comments section criticizing the article," or "bloggers sharing incisive criticism."
A lot (a lot) of people intuitively understand something, but throw it out because it doesn't align with how they want (or need) things to be.
It seems even otherwise intelligent people will cultivate as much ignorance as possible to try and bend reality.
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?
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).
I am reminded of a line from Ulrich Beck, who said that real risk comes "on cat's paws"
I think the author is missing the point. A company cannot unilaterally pace the frontier -- they'll just be left behind. It requires coordinated action 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 without government permission), you still have Chinese labs who will catch up to the frontier eventually. To truly pace the frontier, you'd need some sort of international agreement.
That's why Dario and others are saying loudly that we should pace the frontier in the hopes that our leaders will take up the issue and do something about it. We'll see if that happens -- though I don't have a lot of confidence that it will.
Exactly. "Game Theory" keeps coming up in these threads, yet it doesn't seem like anybody knows how it actually applies to this situation.
Let Anthropic pace themselves without any sort of enforcement or even agreement for others to pace themselves, too. Then Anthropic is gone, overnight, and we're back to square one, except now there's even more centralization of power and authority.
These companies are literally asking for governments to regulate them specifically because they need something stronger than just a couple of Tweets from some CEOs loosely agreeing to ambiguous terms.
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:
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.
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.
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