OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says that it may be time “pace” AI development so the world will be ready for it.
“We may have to pace the rate of AI development to give ourselves enough time for society to harden around some of these new capability levels,” he told Patrick O’Shaughnessy, the host of the Invest Like the Best podcast, while also “trying to figure out how we do that in a way that does not feel like regulatory capture for anyone and also does not feel like collusion among the frontier labs.”
Altman has avoided signing on to past campaigns to slow AI progress, calling a 2023 open letter that proposed a similar slowdown “missing most technical nuance about where we need the pause.”
Apparently, he’s softened on the idea, thanks in part to the incident where one of OpenAI’s advanced models managed to break out of a secure computing environment and hack into Huggingface, an online model database, using several zero-day exploits.
On the podcast, the OpenAI co-founder called it an “extremely sci-fi cyber incident…[t]his is the first security incident that I have felt very viscerally.”
OpenAI researchers have paused training on that model while they work out how to keep their sandbox secure. But Altman said that as models become more powerful, the need to “pace” their development could become key to safe deployment.
Employees at OpenAI and Anthropic have already begun circulating a petition using similar language. While model safety and alignment has always been a concern in the AI world, the arrival of Anthropic’s highly capable Mythos model earlier this year has turned hypotheticals into real-world problems.
