I don't understand. They're slowing the development because they want to or because they have to? Because of ethical concerns? Or because of economics factors that prevent them from delivering results?
Since when have ethical concerns slowed the pace of technology?
> OpenAI said on Wednesday that it was pushing for mandatory national AI safety requirements in the United States, citing concerns that advanced AI systems could accelerate its own development.
No, Altman is saying this exactly because he wants to avoid regulation.
This is a common tactic in any industry. Say that you will self-regulate, but then a decade or so later everybody wonders why anyone thought it was a good idea to allow an industry to make their own rules.
My money is on this as well. Their model improvements are getting more marginal over time, they have no moat, Anthropic is moving past them and apart from software engineering and a few tech fields LLMs fail to deliver business value.
So the “slowing down” narrative is a convenient story to spin.
The problem is that even if the majority of labs decide to slow down, there will be one lab, somewhere, with dark money moving forward. The military wouldn't let that chance pass by.
Maybe we're about to test the scifi trope that a common enemy - like a superior invading alien life form - is the only thing that could unite all of humanity.
I think they will all conveniently "decide" to slow down because models are becoming crazy expensive, both per token and how much tokens they need to do anything meaningful. The difference between Sol and Astra is 150% pricing increase per token. The next one could be, I don't know, Orion, at $150 and it won't do anything meaningfully different than Astra. It's quite safe to say that they have ingested all human knowledge and because models are inherently just statistical generators, they are not expanding it, just rehashing what we already know anyway.
> In August, OpenAI paused much of its model development for two weeks to bolster its defenses after its AI agents escaped containment and hacked open-source platform Hugging Face.
That’s one sneaky way to remove OpenAI responsibility…
Meta in their lawsuit negotiated 5B to be paid out only if other market players agree on implementing safeguards.
In the same vein OpenAI can slow down competition, lock out opensource AI.
As well, the weaponisation of AI is already there, open ai can switch off safeguards at will. A massive swarm was allocated to solving Millenium problems in a few days. Imagine the US having such a weapon, they want to ensure other nations cannot have this kind of access. I imagine the US might be very interested in stifling globaal Innovation and be sympathetic to OpenAI for these reasons.
I’m curious why you use this language of “appears to match or even beat”, seemed pretty clear from the benchmarks that it’s well ahead of Fable. Do you doubt the reporting?
All they're saying to the other players is: let's lock it down and slice up the market between us.
Claiming Skynet is just around the corner is a great way to get the public to believe only these huge companies can harness AI, and how all open-source models should be outlawed.
There are no open source models, at least not useful ones. Open weight is not the same as open source. Open weight models are still just inscrutable binary blobs that you can (theoretically) run on your own computer instead of through a SAAS web app. The open weight model labs don't even provide a high level catalog or any description whatsoever about what went into the training data.
This is not open source and we really should stop conflating the two things.
Words are cheap, and Altman is a salesman. He’s just staying whatever he needs to say to keep people off his back. I don’t put any stock into this statement whatsoever. He may slow development, or he may not, but whether he does will depend almost entirely on what’s best for him and his company, not humanity.
Fable and Sol were pretty big step functions, but I wonder how much if this, from openai and anthropic, is knowing they are somewhat tapped out. That they don't have a ton more to give. Maintain the mystique under a veneer of, "oh we would build the magic wish machine if we were allowed, but we're not, here's Fable 5.8 instead".
Astra has a lot of new capabilities but man, Armin once again being an early lead indicator, and in this case showing that the model seriously has some screws loose.
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[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 4.1 ms ] threadSince when have ethical concerns slowed the pace of technology?
> OpenAI said on Wednesday that it was pushing for mandatory national AI safety requirements in the United States, citing concerns that advanced AI systems could accelerate its own development.
This is a common tactic in any industry. Say that you will self-regulate, but then a decade or so later everybody wonders why anyone thought it was a good idea to allow an industry to make their own rules.
They're doing no such thing. Altman is saying words ahead of the midterms.
So the “slowing down” narrative is a convenient story to spin.
That’s one sneaky way to remove OpenAI responsibility…
As well, the weaponisation of AI is already there, open ai can switch off safeguards at will. A massive swarm was allocated to solving Millenium problems in a few days. Imagine the US having such a weapon, they want to ensure other nations cannot have this kind of access. I imagine the US might be very interested in stifling globaal Innovation and be sympathetic to OpenAI for these reasons.
They might not be as interested in slowing down if Anthropic currently had a significantly better model than them!
Claiming Skynet is just around the corner is a great way to get the public to believe only these huge companies can harness AI, and how all open-source models should be outlawed.
This is not open source and we really should stop conflating the two things.
Astra has a lot of new capabilities but man, Armin once again being an early lead indicator, and in this case showing that the model seriously has some screws loose.