Jordi Fàbrega

THE PACING IS A NINJA MOVE - But be careful what you campaign for. In any competitive sport, I have seldom found people exercise restraint - they usually have a capture the flag mentality. Don't I want to be the best? The first? The only? - this is how we have been programmed. In the AI race, winning is existential. All AI labs have to race to generate revenue to be able to sustain the enormous amount of committed capital to "not be left behind" in the infrastructure build. There isn't enough room for many. So the desire to slow down is puzzling, but perhaps if the whole system slows down, the rules of winning can be the same for all. Do we have a problem that AI could be a killer? Model capability is a tale of two cities, at one end the models are showing their prowess in tasks like cyber or math as seen recently, so there is likely a probability that the models get extremely powerful and could precipitate a world event. At the same time, in many domains the lack of training data makes the models woefully inadequate. Even in areas like cyber - the LLMs aren't great at the edge cases and generally not economical for the defender case, but great for the attackers. Funnily - in all their "concern" it is still an uphill battle to get them to expose APIs for third party security companies like ours, for us to build robust security for AI adoption. It's slow progress. So why do this? I do believe deep down this is a commercial strategy. A ninja strategy. The liability associated with a model gone rogue has the potential of wiping out the economic opportunity of any frontier company. How do you best show the duty of care? You show that you care. How do you make sure you don't lose out to your competitors? You get them to do the same! If that becomes the industry standard for duty of care, you have a collective first line of defense. Who do you get to govern this? "Yourself" - that is what I think will become the achilles heel. The risk? Open source! China! Countries other than the US! So you ask for a global agreement, because you don't want to be sued in other markets who might even be more punitive. But that was an afterthought - that afterthought will cost. Thks pacing campaign rhetoric has become the talk of the town and it might work. Everyone has jumped into the debate. Both sides of the house, nation states. CEOs (present company included). It's more fun discussing the evil of AI than basics of economic affordability or international trade. The result: We might end up with AI safety boards, regulation in micro jurisdictiona and a fragmented fabric of laws around the world which would make compliance and liability a challenge. Perhaps the intended consequence of pacing would have an unintended consequence of a labyrinth of regulation. Regulation destined to cause a slowdown. Who wins? Simplicity. Open source? Open source is already on its way to gaining more adoption, this could drive it further, faster, each iteration of open source gets closer to frontier LLMs - making it viable to deploy them for more and more use cases. In the end, how will the evaluators know as AI gets smarter, that AI hasn't figured their role out and outsmarts them at their task! That will be the next frontier :)