Anthropic's Dario Amodei must be the most annoying CEO in the country. The effective altruist announced on Saturday that "we must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models." His colleagues at OpenAI, XAI, and GoogleMind joined him.
TL;DR for Amodei's interminably long essay: "Over the last few months, I have become convinced that fully addressing the risks requires even more prudence—not just investing in risk prevention, but pacing the rate of capabilities advancement so that risk prevention has time to keep up," he wrote, in addition to a lot (like, a lot) of other stuff.
His call for a temporary slowdown in AI development follows his showdown this winter with the Department of War about who gets to decide how the American military can use cutting-edge artificial intelligence capabilities, for which it was at the time paying Anthropic.
We concur with the tech entrepreneur David Sacks, currently serving as the chairman of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, whose rejoinder to all of Amodei's handwringing and thumb-sucking was: Well then, stop already. Stop the progress, stop the coding, and for God's sake, stop the moralizing. "But stop pretending you need anyone else's permission. Stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel. Stop pretending you need a regulatory approval process that supersedes product liability," Sacks posted to social media over the weekend. "Most of all, stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic. You face massive product-liability exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyberattack. The market already punishes models that behave in unpredictable or unauthorized ways. After the Hugging Face episode, it is simply good business for OpenAI and Anthropic to trade some raw power for reliability and predictability. Call it alignment if you want. It is also just giving customers what they want."
Many Americans are worried about the impacts of artificial intelligence on their lives—and the more they hear and see of Amodei and his colleagues, the more those concerns will increase, since the American people will not tolerate a phony.
Americans are also concerned about—and invested in winning—the technological arms race with China. Amodei & Co. are calling for "cooperation with China" aimed as "global pacing" of AI, which would mean ceding the American edge in AI development. That's also a risk, and our friend John Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary magazine, likened it to atomic bomb creator Robert Oppenheimer's pained lament to then-president Harry Truman in October 1945 that Oppenheimer had "blood on his hands" and his demand that atomic energy be put under international control. That didn't go over well with Truman, who described Oppenheimer in a letter to Secretary of State Dean Acheson as a "crybaby scientist."
President Trump has responded with similar common sense, rejecting calls for data center moratoria and emphasizing the importance of maintaining the edge on China. If our tech elites have a modicum of that common sense, they will shut up and code.
