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Dario Amodei Wants to Pace A.I. The Industry Needs to Pace Its Release.

Dario Amodei, Sam Altman and Elon Musk have converged on a surprising idea: A.I. needs to slow down. But the more important question may be whether the industry can keep advancing while becoming more deliberate about deployment.

Competition in the A.I. industry is fierce, so when A.I. leaders start singing the same tune, I take notice. This September brought a surprising outbreak of agreement following an open letter from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei sounding the alarm over the risks of A.I. In an essay published online, he argued that while the development of A.I. is inevitable, the pace at which frontier systems become more capable should slow down enough to give companies and governments time to address the risks. Meanwhile, rivals including Elon Musk and Sam Altman were quick to voice their agreement. 

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The fallout has been remarkable. Awareness of the risks of A.I. has reached new heights, and the public conversation has become noticeably more focused on the potential harms of increasingly capable systems. Even King Charles III has weighed in, calling on A.I. leaders to protect humanity from the technology’s “existential dangers.”

China, meanwhile, has voiced concern that calls from U.S. A.I. leaders to slow development are a coordinated effort to limit China’s ability to catch up in the A.I. race. Amodei himself has acknowledged the tension between slowing the frontier and maintaining the U.S. lead in A.I., including by proposing measures that would restrict the transfer of advanced A.I. chips to China. The result is a debate about what should be allowed to move quickly, what should be tested first and who should decide when a system is ready for widespread use. 

What “pacing A.I.” actually means

Amid so much noise around Amodei’s comments, it’s easy to lose sight of what it actually means to “pace” A.I. From my view, the objective isn’t to slow the A.I. race itself. Far from it. Investment in compute infrastructure and........

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