We must pace the frontier

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• Hacker News
• > Not building the technology deprives humanity of benefits or simply places AI in the hands of authoritarian powers

  Can someone clarify this for me? How far along would the open weight models be without the frenzied pace of the frontier labs?

  As a non-US citizen, which authoritarian powers is he referring to? As far as I'm aware, the US is the only country using frontier models to conduct air strikes on civilians and orchestrate assassinations of foreign governments.

  by zinodaur
• Anthropic is about to go public, but they figured they can't keep making improvement at the same pace they used to. If the frontier is paced, they can continue hyping their unreleased capabilities that coincidentally cannot be released due to things outside their control. Which buy them more time to try to improve the models.
  by un_montagnard
• Distillation is a great thing for consumers. It improves competition and reduces the massive moats that OpenAI and Anthropic have in compute that would otherwise lead them to be duopolists. It’s also only fair that AIs trained on humanity’s wealth of knowledge for Pennie’s allow competition to train on humanity’s wealth of knowledge at market cost.
  by iloveoof
• I don't see how the dual goals of "we have to make an agreement with China for mutual slowdown" but also "we have to ensure we will always stay ahead of China" would work.

  I imagine the first thing the chinese government would demand in negotiations about such an agreement would be a lifting of the chip and distillation ban.

  > Some may believe these measures make it more difficult to cooperate with China, but I believe the opposite is true: these measures increase the leverage held by democracies and make an agreement more likely in the future.

  Everyone can believe what they like, but it seems to me the "leverage" in that case would exactly be the ability to lift those measures - you can't have both, use them as leverage and keep them active at the same time.

  by xg15
• I like the idea of pacing the frontier, but while we’re talking about restrictions, I like restrictions of another sort more. Namely, restricting the use of AI in corporate environments so that it does not destroy the economy as it advances.

  The chance of getting broad agreement on “pacing” is fairly low, meaning that all of this likely won’t happen and the race will continue. However, even in the unlikely event that the frontier does get paced, all this does is slow down the economic displacement and not by very much.

  If the socially beneficial goals of AI are to make fundamental advancement in medicine and science, then restrict the use of AI to those purposes.

  Don’t use AI to replace every job, from graphic designer to accountant to software developer. Place legal restrictions on (at least) large companies such that they may not use AI to replace human labor in this way.

  The pitch for AI is always such that everyone’s living standards are increased, yet the actual actions we see are aimed squarely at reducing them. How about the labs put their money where their mouth is and stop trying to replace all human labor, and actually concentrate on the things they claim to care about? And how about introducing legislation to enforce that?

  This probably has less chance of happening than pacing the frontier, but it’s the kind of pacing that most people would actually want to see.

  by Chance-Device
• Dario's proposed approach is a classic example of capital attempting to control technological advancement and the means of production. For the first time in human history, any member of the working class can just about afford to have a team of expert scientist/physician/lawyer/engineers working directly for them.

  Super intelligence (the ability to have many smarter minds than your own reporting to you) has always been available to the wealthy and powerful. They used it to invent nuclear weapons, cause climate change, mechanize warfare, and pillage the global south.

  Now that this same tool is on the cusp of being available to everyone, capital is starting to panic and throw up fences. They want to pump the breaks on a revolution they know they can't control. They see what they've done with super intelligence and (perhaps not unreasonably) fear what the masses will do with that same power.

  by academia_hack
• I don’t understand all the comments assuming that RSI is the real threat here. Dario is admitting that they failed to solve alignment. Without alignment, further improvements in capability turn LLMs into wanton felony generators. This call to pace the frontier is dressed up as altruism but it’s an admission that they cannot produce a marketable product better than what they have. Pacing the frontier means the US labs have lost their moat and are dead in the water.
  by RGS1811
• At what point do we stop engaging with Anthropic’s leadership in good faith and acknowledge their track record,

  - no open weights

  - can’t use claude to research AI

  - train on everyone else’s IP and sell it back to them

  - 8 regulatory capture attempts and counting

  - so controlling they are the only US company blacklisted by the US government

  This is not effective altruism / rationalism gone wild, it’s just monopolistic anti-competitive business practices masquerading as ethics, and they’ll continue getting away with this until we look past their sensationalism and hit them with antitrust.

  Altman gets so much hate but OpenAI has been a far better steward (on 3/5 above at least) than Anthropic!

  by cuuupid