Dario has written that we need to “pace the frontier,” and Sam has agreed. People may be surprised by my response: go ahead. You guys are the frontier. By any reasonable metric — market share, revenue growth, model capability — the two of you have a duopoly on frontier intelligence. You’ve also claimed the lead is widening because of recursive self-improvement. I don’t see what you see in the lab. If the unreleased models are scary enough that you think you should slow down, I support your decision to be responsible. 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. Stop pretending METR is independent when it is intertwined with Anthropic’s investors and staff. Stop pretending you need those same evaluators to police competitors who aren’t even at the frontier. 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. Pacing the frontier would also create breathing room for a more intelligent conversation about regulation than Bernie Sanders’ “shut it all down.” China is very unlikely to join a global agreement, as you know, and that has to be taken into account as well. So go ahead and pace the frontier. You are the ones setting it. The easiest way not to build superintelligence is for you to agree not to build it. Demanding your preferred regulatory framework as the price of that will look like blackmail of the public and the political system. So just do it. If you do, you’ll buy goodwill for the next conversation. If you don’t, we’ll know this was just another bid for regulatory capture — or an election-season psyop.

I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier. This has been a primary topic of discussions we've had at OpenAI in recent weeks. Committing to having independent evaluators with employee-like access is a great idea, and we will do the same. We'll have more to share soon.

When are tech folk going to get that people like wasting time, it's life. They don't optimize for efficiency, they try to get by, they watch dumb stuff, they enjoy shopping. Inefficiency is another work for living and life. Your m mean and median job isn't a software engineer in Menlo Park, it's Ashley in accounts in a not for profit in Columbus, it's Jesse , the office manager for a tool rental business in Tallahassee, they are more likely to use a Fax machine than Slack. They quite like meetings because they like chatting, they'll use AI to make a better invite to their baby shower, not agentify their job. These people, nor their bosses boss, aren't in a rush to build software as a side hustle, they are keen to use AI to check if their vet is overcharging them. They'd like AI to check spelling on the email to the school governor. They don't want agentic commerce, they want AI to be in the background and make living a little less stressful

AI means people need to stop thinking so much about what their boss wants They need to start thinking much much more about what customers want And that will make a big difference in society: too much of it is caring about Keynesian beauty contests and other such contests that are disconnected from the direct needs of others Less dead weight loss. More actually helping people.

Scoop: Meta is creating a new applied AI engineering organization with teams that will have a flat structure of up to 50 employees per one manager, according to an internal memo I viewed. (correx previous tweet that said org would be part of Reality Labs)

In 1992, Congress quietly capped your shower at 2.5 gallons per minute. It was supposed to conserve water. Instead, it killed one of the simplest human joys. You know the feeling: lukewarm mist, high pressure but no weight. The “low-flow” shower mandate was buried in a sweeping energy bill, justified in the name of environmental conservation. But decades later, data shows that low-flow laws actually make us take longer showers, increasing water waste (and making all of us unsatisfied as a result). A shower isn’t just about hygiene. It’s restoration. Meditation. Recovery. It’s the one place you can be alone, warm, still. And it’s time we unlocked it. This 1992 law is one example in a string of misguided, scarcity-based solutions to problems that could be improved with better technology or management. Removing the federal standard would allow market dynamics to eventually land on the appropriate balance of flow-rate, pressure, cost to install, and cost to operate. It would also make us all a lot happier with our shower experience (and cleaner). Technology can give us efficient, satisfying showers. But first we have to repeal one dumb, outdated law. Shower/acc isn’t just about plumbing — it’s about freedom. Read the piece on the site. Link in the next post 👇