Pacing the frontier

The historic analog most befitting AI are weapons. It provides an advantage to companies and governments in creating weapons, in surveilling people and thus gaining leverage over individuals, in controlling what individuals can do or cannot stop doing. It thus follows the laws of weapons control - the more restrictions are threatened to be imposed, the more even the smallest actors will fight to get more of it. They may not understand or know what they are getting, but they will want more of it because their potential rivals have it. Governments are the ultimate customer here - they have the money, the energy, and the appetite to consume AI infinitely in battlement against opponents - foreign and domestic. The only approximate solution is to prevent any restrictions on the use of it - a-la-2nd amendment (the upside of that is it advances the AI for future use and is thus in the interest of governments as well). Modern large models seem to be compressible and thus we may see more and more tiny sub-specialized varieties. But the push to slow the frontier in weaponry always leads to the reverse.

The HN discourse on this subject is incredibly discouraging to me. It's completely nonconstructive.

I take the pace of AI development seriously. All of my friends who work at AI Labs take it seriously. It's very easy to make lazy, shallow dismissals that leaders like Dario/Demis/Sam are acting purely out of self-interest.

If AI does pose biological risk, or could destabilize geopolitics, or even just poses economic risks, surely a joint petition like this is a good thing? We should want the AI Labs to make binding agreements to proceed safely and slower, rather than being stuck in a suboptimal game theoretical race to advance unsafely. We should be hoping that nations can make binding agreements. Our discourse here should be about the substance of what these agreements could be and the practicality of enforcement mechanisms.

Anyone serious about this should participate in pacing the frontier by quitting their job so as to not potentially contribute to the problematic progress. Be the change you want to see!

Curious how that isn't what happens.

I paged through the list of signatories for a little while and saw Anthropic (including, of course, Dario), OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Meta.

I did not see Moonshot.AI, DeepSeek, Z.ai, Mistral, or really any non-American company at all, at least not as far as I could see. I don't consider Meta a "frontier AI" company any more than Moonshot so I don't think that's the issue.

I am sure many of the employees in this list truly believe in the message here, and truly fear the potential consequences. In fairness, at some point a Google employee convinced themselves an LLM about as impressive as GPT 3.x was alive, so it doesn't really take them being correct, they could be wrong and just as honest. But to me, it seems obvious this primarily exists because if we didn't attempt to put a coordinated stop to AI training, then there is no obvious path to OpenAI and Anthropic stopping the growing multi-billion dollar bleed year over year. Whoever stops first in the arms race loses, but if everyone keeps going everyone loses. And with IPOs coming soon, the financials won't remain a mystery forever.

What every company in this list does have in common, of course, is a vested interest in keeping the AI bubble, which doesn't exist since AI is not a bubble obviously, from bursting. If training costs continue to escalate, it's unclear how it could ever not.

Has there ever been a case in human history when technology just stopped advancing, simultaneously world wide, only because a bunch of people wanted it to?

I think these people are either incredibly naive, or, more likely, not acting in good faith.

Something people don't seem to see, and not that it's placed directly in front of you, is that pacing the release and adoption of AI is already happening.

Cost-per-token determines the economic viability of tasks that AI gets applied to. How many tokens would it take to automate all of the responsibilities of a gas station clerk? Probably more than their hourly wage. Job safe.

A slightly larger stretch, that most people attribute to profit margins (labs do not have profit margins, they have unlimited invested capital and no expectation of short-term returns), is the flat-rate billing plans of most code products. Why doesn't Anthropic have a 50x or 100x Max plan? Not that it's impossible, that it releases tokens into the workforce at a greater rate (note that their are hour, day, week limits across most of these services as well).

Hypothetical, but reasoned, and I do not expect most agree with me. If compute as a variable is inferred, this supports the incorporation a deliberate (redundant) one as well.

I'm chinapilled now.

Anthropic is an evil, enemy of humanity company that cannot be allowed to succeed.

What these people want is same thing people in every other field want too, which is being able to use AI as a tool and nothing more. Off course, some of the people that signed this might not recognize this, and the people who didn't sign it are actively working against such an equilibrium.

> We request that the U.S. government support an international effort to develop the technical and governance tools needed to deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development.

This is quite vague to me, what exactly do you mean?

> It is hard to predict exactly how much this will accelerate AI progress, but there is a real risk that capability development rapidly accelerates beyond our ability to understand or control the resulting systems.

This is just the standard AI "doomer" talking point. The dangers of AI just used as a compliment sandwich. "AI is so cool and awesome and that's why we need to slow down."

The real risks are much more boring and much less considered. For just one example:

AI is set to completely upset the Software Development industry. There are 1 to 3 million software developers in the US, depending on how you draw the line exactly. A low-few hundred thousand of those are visa workers.

With AI set to significantly cut into tech employment, what's going to happen to those visa workers? ... The Trump admin is not particularly subtle, even openly talking about retroactively revoking birthright citizenship.

AI & Tech companies love to talk about how their AI is going to hack everything if they're not careful. But not a peep about these ethics concerns.

Even if you [the reader] consider deporting visa workers the ethical move if the amount of jobs shrink, that's not something to be done unprepared or out of nowhere.

Pacing is a really bad idea because China will not slow it down for you.

The first computers were used for war.

The Harvard Mark I was used by von Neumann to calculate the physics of implosion. And then right afterwards, ENIAC was used to calculate the feasibility of the H-bomb. They called it the "Los Alamos problem."

The first computer network, SAGE (or, Semi-Automatic Ground Environment) brought together RADAR data from across the US with air-traffic control data and military flight data to detect overflight by the USSR. It could direct and control fighters to intercept those planes.

If you were sitting there, in 1955, would you have believed that computers and their networks would bring about an extraordinary age?

Imagine if von Neumann and his ilk started campaigning in 1955 to limit the development and use of computers, because surely they can only be used to make weapons, right? Right?

We were lucky to have visionary people like Joe Licklider who could look past the present and see the future. In 1963, he wrote a memo calling for an "Intergalactic Computer Network" (because he knew engineers under-delivered. So if he asked for a galaxy, at least he'd get a planet). And he gave these machines to scientists and people like the original hackers at MIT to play with.

What if Licklider had written memos about how we had to "pace" computers to make sure that other countries wouldn't be able to develop implosion technologies or systems like SAGE? What then?

Do you think you would have the jobs and the prosperity you do today?

If instead of giving away this technology, spreading it, and putting down the seeds for ARPA-net, Licklider had written memos from "concerned scientists" (and I'm sure he could have found a bunch) talking about how computers can only be used for weapons and war! So stop the proliferation of computers! We can't imagine a world with computers small enough to fit inside everything! Even wall sockets! What if your wall socket could do war?!

They didn't, because they knew there's no better way to kill a better future for all mankind than to control it.

† yes, peace. We are more peaceful than we have ever been. Humans can be a violent lot even when reluctant to kill.

> > We request that the U.S. government support an international effort to develop the technical and governance tools needed to deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development.

> 1122 employees of frontier AI companies

'lets us be the gatekeepers of AI because we know better than you'

access to gpu doesnt equal to any special insights to predict future of ai. Everyone and their grandma with enough compute is putting out a model now.

The website does not list all the comments but just around ~50 without any way to load all the ~+1100 more (1132, as of 2026-07-28 2100 UTC).

The number of em-dashes is questionable, existing in many, if not all, the comments.

    > ...AI may end up progressing far more quickly than societies and states can adapt... ~ Stephanie Chan, Google  

I am sorry, but I am not sure whether it's adequate and fair to allow join such statements/petitions to only those who live in it. Isn't it like allow deciding the future for weaponry laws to weapon and war enthusiasts only?

And, this is not serious at this point:

    > ... ~ Source: Anonymous, Meta
    > ... ~ Source: Anonymous, Google

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