Sam Altman is ready to decelerate

What happened

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says that it may be time “pace” AI development so the world will be ready for it. ” Apparently, he’s softened on the idea, thanks in part to the incident where one of OpenAI’s advanced models managed to break out of a secure computing environment and hack into Huggingface, an online model database, using several zero-day exploits.

Ball said that it threatened the economics of frontier labs, making it difficult to separate their safety concerns from their financial interest. “I think a lot of the talk about safety concerns is well-founded, and then a lot of it is about people that just really, even if it’s slightly subconscious, want to concentrate power,” Altman mused, in what reads as a dig at his rival, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei.

The challenge for both that approach to regulation, and any efforts to slow AI development, will be getting the various players in the industry on the same page, whether they are rival frontier labs in the US, or their competitors in China. When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.

Why it matters

” OpenAI researchers have paused training on that model while they work out how to keep their sandbox secure. But Altman said that as models become more powerful, the need to “pace” their development could become key to safe deployment. Employees at OpenAI and Anthropic have already begun circulating a petition using similar language.

While model safety and alignment has always been a concern in the AI world, the arrival of Anthropic’s highly capable Mythos model earlier this year has turned hypotheticals into real-world problems.

However, the industry has a trust problem, and challenging economics that give major players and incentive to play up the dangers of their systems in ways that experts disagree about — for example, whether or not Anthropic’s Fable model should have been briefly banned from use or not. Similarly, when Kimi K3, a large, open-weight model built in China, was released, OpenAI head of strategic futures Dean W.

What to watch

” Still, OpenAI has pushed back against efforts to develop government rules for AI models, instead preferring an industry-led approach where AI labs would create ostensibly independent organizations that would evaluate the security of models and the safety approach of their makers.