Questions Mount Over What an AI ‘Slowdown’ Would Look Like
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"Questions mount over what an AI ‘slowdown’ would look like"
Image source: Reuters
Image caption: Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has called for the pace of development to be slowed down.
By Zoe Kleinman, Technology Editor
Published 26 minutes ago
There have been numerous warnings from AI’s top executives about existential threats over the years. I attended the world’s first AI safety summit at Bletchley Park in November 2023, where the focus was on severe threats imagined as science fiction, with discussions centered around powerful AI models.
Three years later, many of those same voices now express grave concern.
On Saturday, Dario Amodei, head of AI company Anthropic, urged a slowdown in development—a sentiment echoed by Sam Altman of OpenAI and Elon Musk. Meanwhile, AI researcher Jacob Coxon, who recently left Anthropic, told the BBC that staff developing these systems are "genuinely frightened" for humanity’s future.
These voices add up to a chorus of serious concerns, but enforcing a slowdown is far from simple.
AI staff ‘genuinely frightened’ for humanity’s future, ex-Anthropic researcher tells BBC
Published 3 hours ago
The US is believed to be anxious about losing the AI race to China. On Sunday, President Trump claimed the US was ahead and declared, "Whoever wins AI, wins."
China isn’t known for wanting second place; everyone I speak to says even a temporary pause would leave them behind. This echoes the Cold War-era nuclear disarmament debate where the problem was that nobody wanted to make the first move.
There’s also the question of how a slowdown would be implemented. Who would enforce it? Would companies need to prove transparency about their work, and more importantly, what they’re choosing not to do? That would require an unprecedented level of trust, which the tech industry has yet to earn.
Although Amodei proposed a three-point plan including independent monitoring of AI models, industry-wide regulation, and global regulation, some question its practicality.
"Nobody has given a substantive explanation of what ‘slowdown’ means," said Ed Zitron, CEO of EZ Primary Research. "Putting a plant from METR, where one of the guys who quit Anthropic went, in every AI company? Democratic and global ‘co-ordination’? Doesn’t mean anything to me."
Zitron argues that pausing AI model training would leave companies vulnerable to Chinese rivals who could capture and distill their work. He suggests this could burst the AI bubble but says right now, understanding what a "slowdown" entails is thin on the ground.
