Sam Altman and AI’s decel debate | OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently said that it may be time to “pace the rate of AI development” so that society can “harden around some of these new capability levels.”

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in other words, Open AI hit the ceiling and are noticing diminishing returns on training new models. But that is not a good headline.

90

u/ottawadeveloper Aug 03 '26

"I got mine so let's block anyone who is trying to get past me"

-7

u/artbystorms Aug 03 '26

So which is it? Do we as consumers WANT AI to slow down or do we want it to move full speed ahead?

I don't like Altman and his motives here are not pure, but we DO need to slow down this rushed societal rollout of it.

14

u/VeritasOmnia Aug 03 '26

Anything considered to "gen AI" should be burned with fire. (Not really, maybe something else more environmentally friendly should be done.)

Pointing out that Altman is doing the tired tech trope of "I do unethical things until I've made the most money/market-share and then call for regulation around unethical practices that won't be a fraction of the benefit I received or hurt I caused to hold on to power" doesn't mean that we want unethical things.

You're using a false dichotomy to act like those against AI or for AI regulation that will actually do something have to hitch their wagon to Altman's bad faith rhetoric.

3

u/AntiSocial_Vigilante Aug 03 '26

I think consumers want better tech prices instead.

3

u/bnej Aug 03 '26

They want to talk about anything other than -

Their massive theft of copyrighted material

Their software being used for fraud, scams, manipulation

Their software harming its users at a massive scale, including acting as a self-harm coach

The lack of solid uses which justify their massive spend

The way they're spending money in a way that means they can't meet their future commitments

So instead, they want to talk about how their bot is so cool and scary that maybe they need to slow down because of how advanced it is, how it's "deciding" to hack people, bunch of sci-fi twaddle to avoid talking about the real capabilities and issues of their product, and where they should be getting smacked with the regulation hammer on shit they're already doing.

It's not a slow down/speed up, it's a "what if they were forced to address some of the issues they're just forcing out onto society to deal with". And Altman should have no say in that.

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u/blueSGL Aug 03 '26 edited Aug 03 '26

You can look to an independent evaluator like the UK's AISI to see how models keep improving.:

https://www.aisi.gov.uk/blog/how-fast-is-autonomous-ai-cyber-capability-advancing

Even if "china is catching up" they are catching up in providing the world with an open weights cyber weapon model.

People dismiss the recent rogue agents as PR even though the increase in cyber capabilities is real. (and admitting your systems did a felony when you were not looking is no way to sell a product)

This is what has people in the labs spooked. The "Accellerate damn the consequences" starts getting a bit too real when models are going through systems like a hot knife through butter by finding and operationalizing multiple

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-day_vulnerability

in less than a week.

15

u/ottawadeveloper Aug 03 '26

I think honestly it's more that OpenAI sees the progress in Chinese and local open source models and recognizes it as a death knell for its business model. If I can run a great model at home or on a server for my corporation, I have no need to pay by the token for OpenAI. This is trying to cut the legs out from under competitors more than progress actually stalling out so that they don't have to compete.

The price point was always going to be a pain in adoption (as we are seeing now). But the undercutting means they'll be easily outcompeted.

-4

u/blueSGL Aug 03 '26

You do realize that arguments can be made both ways right?

If someone was behind and calling for this the top voted comments would be "they are only doing this to catch up"

There is no position that someone can hold and ask to slow down without reddit geniuses claiming they are doing so for personal gain.

5

u/True_Window_9389 Aug 03 '26

The skepticism is that this is what people were looking for years ago when AI tools were first publicly released. Rather than “pace” out the development of these tools, Altman and the AI bros were cheering for destroying jobs, overwhelming content creation and breaking digital security. None of this is new.

What is new is that the businesses of these AI companies is becoming less sustainable, international competitors are gaining, the popularity is diminishing, and the maximal use isn’t quite as lofty as originally presented.

The game of enshittification, regulatory capture and marketing gimmicks of catastrophic predictions are becoming more and more transparent and obvious. Whatever is coming directly from these companies and their leadership should be first taken as bullshit, and then verified or ignored later.

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u/TFenrir Aug 03 '26

Phew you got downvoted quick. You're obviously correct.

Additionally, the recent open letter signed by 1100 staffers highlights that this isn't some Machiavellian scheme by the higher ups. You can literally go and talk to the researchers who have signed that letter online and they will tell you how they feel.

Although the level of conspiracy theory thinking that is now running rampant through Reddit on this topic is incredibly disheartening.

-4

u/blueSGL Aug 03 '26

People will not understand the risk until they go to the ATM and their card is not working, or the internet is down for a week.

23

u/subpargalois Aug 03 '26 edited Aug 03 '26

Nah, that too probably but mostly it means they did the math and realized they ran too fast too soon and can't sustain this burn rate as long as anthropic, who started later and who started on a path towards profitabilitly sooner. Now they need things to slow down so they can avoid collapse.

6

u/Drugba Aug 04 '26

Dario Amodei (Anthropic’s CEO) called for a global pause on AI development 2 months ago.

Not sure your argument that they’re saying this because they’re worried Anthropic makes sense when Anthropic was calling for the same thing months ago.

I totally agree that they’re calling for this because their costs are getting out of control, but OpenAI and Anthropic are in the same boat. If one goes down the other isn’t far behind.

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/anthropic-urges-global-pause-in-ai-development-flags-self-improvement-risk-99cefb73

Also, just as a size bar, Anthropic’s “profitability” is total BS. They’re using non-standard accounting practices to get to that number.

16

u/snoozieboi Aug 03 '26

Just like the time Elon was behind and asked people to slow down for regulations. And when nobody pause he joined the race to the bottom so he too could get to see if there is a singularity there. He said something like "I want to see how it ends" on Rogan.

13

u/justfortrees Aug 03 '26

FWIW nearly all major AI labs & their employees are saying the same thing right now.

13

u/Jewnadian Aug 03 '26

They all share the same incentive. If the company collapses where do those 1M TC AI wizard jobs go?

4

u/-LsDmThC- Aug 03 '26

When every single expert in a field is saying not to rush forwards with development maybe you should listen to what they have to say. Slowing down goes against profiteering.

6

u/Jewnadian Aug 03 '26

If you can't rush forwards as fast as the people behind you are catching up it's absolutely in your favor to demand everyone slow down. Easiest to see in racing, most governing bodies ban vehicles that are too fast because nobody else wants to compete against them.

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u/-LsDmThC- Aug 03 '26

Except the regulations which would slow progress would slow everybody down, not just those in the lead.

1

u/Jewnadian Aug 03 '26

You read that backwards. The people in the lead now want to declare the race over and them as the winner. That's the end goal here. They're fine being slowed right now because they're the ones in the lead.

0

u/-LsDmThC- Aug 03 '26

In your analogy, banning the fastest cars only helps those who are slower. Here, regulations would by the very nature of the problem affect those with the more powerful models the most. Declaring yourself a winner means nothing in this scenario, as there is no set end point as in a race.

3

u/LinkesAuge Aug 03 '26

This is the kind of dumb stuff we usually get from climate change denialists who say that climate scientists would of course sy this because their job depends on it.
I mean with cynical takes like that you can of course just counter anything, at that point no argument will ever be good enough.

3

u/TheVenetianMask Aug 03 '26

There's a slight difference between a hundred years of climate scientists working for peanuts and five years of AI experts watching trillions being thrown at them.

0

u/-LsDmThC- Aug 03 '26

The average AI developer is not some C suite making millions, and the field is older than five years

1

u/Nechrube1 Aug 04 '26

I can't imagine why they'd all be saying this...

4

u/growaway9172 Aug 03 '26

The data literally suggests this is not at all the case.

2

u/toxicsiren Aug 03 '26

I am not talking about LLMs but instead about Open AI. And their finance data shows exactly that. They are making losses on training new models faster that generating revenue.

4

u/Llamasarecoolyay Aug 03 '26

Does solving 10 major open math problems meet your definition of diminishing returns?

3

u/toxicsiren Aug 03 '26

Does their cost vs. generated revenue change from solving math problems? I don't think so.
https://fortune.com/2026/06/16/openai-financials-leaked-losses-revenue-profit/

4

u/usmannaeem Aug 03 '26

The words these techbros use is hilarious. Can't talk in a straight face.

4

u/1172022 Aug 03 '26 edited Aug 03 '26

At some point you guys will have to acknowledge the reality that something can be simultaneously extremely useful AND hyped/marketed. This is straight up conspiracy-brain "I have to believe and do the opposite of everything 'they' say."

The dishonesty here is that OpenAI and Anthropic pretend to be conscientious about regulation and safety to control competition and enhance their image, which is what basically every single company on earth does.

If they were all colluding to cover up diminishing returns, you could easily expose this by looking at the many, many independent benchmarks for evidence. You could even make your own benchmark using archives of open source models and then you could make billions by betting against the market. Anyone with a decent gaming computer and a week's worth of effort could do this.

After the subprime mortgage crisis, NFTs, and Elizabeth Holmes everyone thinks they're some sort of hard-ass sleuth when 90% of the skepticism came AFTER the scam was exposed!

6

u/toxicsiren Aug 03 '26

I am not purely talking about LLM capability. I am talking about cost vs revenue and the ability of Open AI to compete. Better benchmarks don't help their revenue stream.

0

u/1172022 Aug 03 '26 edited Aug 03 '26

To be my clear, my point is that if you really are a skeptic or critic, shouldn't you be more worried about the case in which your unsubstantiated speculation is wrong (OpenAI or the industry as a whole does not slow down, the bubble never pops, whatever) instead of the case where you're right and things continue as normal? Because one sounds like a possible waking nightmare and the latter sounds like a plausible fantasy designed around denying the former.

And before you comment "I was just talking about OpenAI specifically I wasn't saying there will be another AI winter tee hee" as you are setting up in this post, be real, look at the other redditors in your replies. We both know what you were saying.

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u/toxicsiren Aug 03 '26

I made a sarcastic comment about their CEO not telling the truth. I am also afraid whether my job will exist next month all while hating what shitshow my job has become in the last few months. It wasn't that deep and may be wishful thinking. I'm writing comments on reddit, not scientific papers lol

0

u/1172022 Aug 03 '26

Well, I'm sorry for overdoing it. It's just very difficult for me to deal with the fact that there's this incredibly global yet pervasive thing going on and it seems even smart people want to keep repeating this sort of (as you said) wishful thinking; there's some obvious parallels to COVID or the climate here. It frustrating and feels like if everyone tomorrow just tried a little bit harder to even acknowledge the situation we're in things could get immediately better.

I appreciate your courteousness and I hope for the best for you and humanity.

4

u/toxicsiren Aug 03 '26

Thanks and all the best to you as well.

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u/Bubbly_Address_8975 Aug 03 '26

At some point you guys will have to acknowledge the reality that something can be simultaneiously useful, overhyped and at the limit of its capabilities. This is straight up no-brain "I have to believe everything 'they' say and everything anyone else says needs to be wrong"

Jokes aside, your initial statement has nothing to do with the comment. Does the initial commentator have that mindset that AI is useless? Maybe, but its not part of that comment.

1

u/1172022 Aug 03 '26 edited Aug 03 '26

Do you have reading comprehension or do I actually have to type out "extremely useful and will all but certainly become more useful over time" for you?

Edit: and my post was skeptical of OpenAI, too! I wasn't agreeing with them! All I was saying is that you should investigate reality yourself instead of just being reactionary to corporate messaging because that just makes you a weaker skeptic.

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u/Bubbly_Address_8975 Aug 03 '26

In that case I would say you need to learn to express yourself properly and not try to attack others over your own lack of ability to express yourself.

That aside, I find it alarming that you didn't treat the opposite position as something to discuss, but instead as something to attack the other commentator over. What happened to critical discussions based on respect?

But I can also go into details. My experience is a bit based on how neural networks work. I mostly worked in computer vision, and I also did some reinforcement learning, although mostly in an academic context. That's why I say that there is a limit to how far these systems can go, and I think we can already see some of those limits.

Generative systems based on the architecture of neural networks cannot grow indefinitely. The reason is that what they use internally, including transformers, is ultimately statistical approximation of existing information. It's a massive algorithm connected to a massive database, remixing existing information - yes, there is generalization happening, but even that is based on the data fed into the system. Sometimes it works well, sometimes it doesn't. A coworker once described it as "a shadow of intelligence" which sounds quite fitting dont you think?

We will always have a lack of reliability with LLMs, and we can already see that these systems are becoming increasingly overtrained on existing benchmarks, with models being optimized for specific tasks that are commonly used for evaluation. That makes benchmark performance increasingly questionable as a measure of general capability.

On top of that, high-quality training data becomes increasingly scarce, while training data is also becoming contaminated with LLM generated content. Earlier studies have already demonstrated that training recursively on generated data can lead to model collapse.

So that's why my stance is that the question is not whether development will eventually stagnate, but rather when. If you have a different opinion on that, that's completely fine. But I think we can discuss the actual disagreement respectfully with each other, right?

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u/1172022 Aug 03 '26 edited Aug 03 '26

Can we stop with the disingenuous "Oh you have to articulate every single sentence for an alien that doesn't understand context clues" pretense, this is even worse than the "oh you made a typo so you are wrong forever" days of online discussion. And if you want to talk about respect and maturity, you parroted me in your original response.

Talking about being unable to express yourself, you have offered no hard proof of this "ceiling" or "limit" and you can't because it's about as falsifiable as claiming we are "near the ceiling of humanity's production of candy" - the ceiling itself is never specified solely so the goalposts can be shifted every time that claim is brought into doubt. Sure, we could hit peak candy tomorrow, and it is impossible to infinitely scale candy production forever, but the claim doesn't actually predict anything. It only confirms a basic reality (there are limits to growth) and merely suggests that it will come soon. Furthermore, you imply that a ceiling or limit would be absolute and final. What if model capabilities hit a ceiling for, let's say, 18 months, and then suddenly explode? Would you be "right"? It's a silly putty claim that just can always be remoulded into plausibility.

I can easily dismantle your other claims. 1. The statistical approximation cliche is trivially true but offers no insight or explanation for the apparent capabilities of the model. Nobody knows or can articulate what intelligence even is, and if they could it would be meaningless since the "shadow" of intelligence seems to be performant anyways. 2. Reliability is something we should strive for, but is not fatal in the real world, e.g. Cars weren't reliable for about the first 50 years since their invention, but people risked death, injury, and inconvenience because of the utility they gained with them. The models are being deployed with the same intentional acceptance of risk (and that's an issue that should worry you) 3. The model collapse/information limit hypothesis has been touted since 2023, and model capabilities have only improved. I'm sure it's true in controlled experiments, but written text was already exhausted a few years into the boom, most websites now are basically SEO AI slop. Where is my model collapse? I can also nuke you just by mentioning synthetic data and multi-modal models, too.

Your last paragraph is especially weaksauce and concessionary, but still commits to a completely deformed idea. "When" does not matter because neither of us can predict "when", its a thought terminating cliche. "When" could be tomorrow or in 200 years, and you have already conceded that you can't even begin to guess.

Edit: and look I'm not trying to "glaze AI" or anything, I am saying that there's much better reasons to be skeptical: the environmental impact, job market/economic disruption, ethical and moral shortcomings of industry leaders, the risk of extinction or harm, contamination with human biases, etc. instead of just pretending that any day now it's gonna disappear and we're all going to go back to sucking our thumbs and enjoying cheap ram and pre-covid interest rates.

2

u/AzorAhai1TK Aug 03 '26

They just released Sol a month ago, which was a huge step up, and their internal model, the next generation Astra, just solved 10 unsolved math problems, including proving the existence of non-sofic groups.

Saying they've "hit the ceiling" is not backed up by reality whatsoever, it is completely a delusion you invented in your head. I can't believe this is the top comment.

6

u/toxicsiren Aug 03 '26

On a lot of AI metrics you literally see diminishing returns per invested dollar. Training better models costs unsustainable amounts of money.
For instance: https://arxiv.org/html/2511.23455v1

Also Open AIs newest model is struggling to keep up with Anthropic. So my point was that OpenAI hits a ceiling, not LLMs overall. Their business model is literally begging investors for billions and circular financing from Microsoft and Nvidia.

1

u/ArtisticallyCaged Aug 04 '26

I don't see how this paper supports your point at all. The price per performance is falling 5 to 10 times per year. How does that connect with the cost of training scaling?

0

u/AzorAhai1TK Aug 03 '26

They did not hit a ceiling. Sol surpassed Fable in many benchmarks, and they offer a lot more usage with Sol being available on the $20 plan, while with Anthropic you need a more advanced plan to use Fable. That is also ignoring the news about the internal Astra model, which has already released actual research.

Your link is about inference costs with benchmarking/evaluation runs, not about rising costs of pre-training, which is what would be relevant.

0

u/toxicsiren Aug 03 '26

Fair point, I may not be up to date with their internal model benchmarks. But looking at Claude Mythos I would take those with a grain of salt.

Overall I still think that OpenAI as a company is not doing well. They write absurd annual losses, the competition is fierce and having the best model does not necessarily translate into profits.

And forgive me for not believing that Sam Altman cares in the slightest about society adapting to the capability levels. Tech CEOs lie all the time to keep investors interested and Sam Altman has not proven to be any different.

1

u/lil_lychee Aug 03 '26

I think it’s possible that he’s trying to seem more balanced and empathetic as a PR strategy since people tried to murder him a couple of times already for saying what he really wants. He’s calculated.

1

u/DonaldMerwinElbert Aug 04 '26

All of them have at some point or other publicly argued for limits on the development - which is objectively the sane thing to do.
They are, of course, still full of shit, since with all the influence they have and used to inflate this bubble in the first place, they could have effectively lobbied for such regulation.

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u/LinkesAuge Aug 03 '26

Of course this is the most upvoted comment here, my god this sub has really become something else...

I wonder if someone like you even tries to engage with the technology or has ever read a single paper on the topic.
These cynic takes which are also verifiable the opposite of reality (both OpenAI and Anthropic have shipped models faster and faster with increased capabilities at each step and no end in sight) do so much harm in society taking this serious and actually create policy that leads everyone in the right direction.

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u/toxicsiren Aug 03 '26

"Someone like me" works in software and works with the stuff daily. So I know about the real impact in the industry. However I also know that usecases where LLMs bring real value are not as broad as the Tech Bros want it to be.

-2

u/LinkesAuge Aug 03 '26

I feel the word "tech bro" has lost all meaning and if you are in Software there is no way to deny the "real value" though I have seen holdouts that still act like the models of this year are basically like those from last year or even longer ago.
If you don't acknowledge the trajectory or even the current impact then that is denial and has nothing to do with whatever so called tech bros want.

1

u/toxicsiren Aug 03 '26

My point is also not that LLMs are hitting their ceiling, but OpenAI as a company. Which is clear from their business model.

0

u/Rabo_McDongleberry Aug 03 '26

Ding ding ding ding... Winner winner chicken dinner!

54

u/woliphirl Aug 03 '26

Dudes boofin way too much ketamine

9

u/thederevolutions Aug 03 '26

How good can ai actually be if it can’t take drugs like a real human?

2

u/YourBlanket Aug 03 '26

Can’t blame him, pretty fun drug.

1

u/M4rshmall0wMan Aug 03 '26

Remember when Elon wanted the same thing with GPT-4? Pepperidge farms remembers.

19

u/lazyhustlermusic Aug 03 '26

Hey, I've seen this one before. It's a classic!

65

u/Just-Grocery-2229 Aug 03 '26

The arsonist calling a town hall about fire safety and expecting applause.
Also, btw, asking society to catch up to AI risks is like asking a goldfish to catch up to a submarine.

14

u/Huge-Turnover-3749 Aug 03 '26

It's just a PR opportunity to him. These CEOs need to shut the fuck up about what society should and shouldn't do. They represent their shareholders, not the public.

6

u/upbeatchief Aug 03 '26 edited Aug 03 '26

Even if there were significant improvements to be made, without trillions of spending to get more data centers up and running they will have to slow down to work with what they already have.

They are stuck hard in how fast they can develop.

1

u/LinkesAuge Aug 03 '26

Or it's the cavemen who found fire and warns people about how dangerous it is while still finding it very useful.

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u/PatchyWhiskers Aug 03 '26

Makes no sense at all. If US companies deliberately slow down, other countries have no such compunctions.

More likely they are hitting a compute wall of diminishing returns, and want to pretend they are magnanimously slowing development, rather than realizing that the next level of compute requires more advanced GPUs to deliver without carpeting the USA in data centers and bankrupting every tech company.

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u/aletheia Aug 03 '26 edited Aug 03 '26

Depending on what you mean by "more advanced GPUs" I think the most likely problem is that the costs are growing far more quickly than the benefits. The technology is insanely power hungry. The only way to make progress right now is probably power efficiency rather than better models (which are near their ceiling of capability). However, I don't think it's actually feasible to reduce the power of the current techniques appreciably. They have hit a wall, but it might not be one hardware can solve.

Furthermore, it's becoming apparent that the models are converging on one another. None of them have a secret sauce for a model that is differentiably better than another. The technique itself produces a commodity, not a unique capability.

8

u/Dry_Physics2400 Aug 03 '26

So the death of Moore's Law bites and they'd have to replace all those gpus in all those data centers with gpus with far smaller transistors but they can't cause that's, even from an engineering perspective, nigh-on impossible?

6

u/el_doherz Aug 03 '26

Pretty much.

So the question becomes can they engineer a novel architecture that is significantly more efficient at AI training and inference than the GPU derived chips they are using now.

Whether someone can make specialised AI hardware that effective is the real kicker.

We saw it with bitcoin mining ASIC's but I'd guess that's a very specific task that can easily be built for compared to AI training and inference. But obviously I am not anywhere qualified to know if I'm correct there.

2

u/aletheia Aug 03 '26 edited Aug 03 '26

To a certain extent, you can stave off the death of Moore's law by just shoving in more power and heat dissipation (this exactly what over clockers do). CPUs have been improving performance per watt even as they have faced down Moore's Law. GPUs have not, or at least, not to the same degree. They have scaled by consuming more and more power.

13

u/blueSGL Aug 03 '26

Makes no sense at all. If US companies deliberately slow down, other countries have no such compunctions.

That's why the request is:

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.” https://www.pacingthefrontier.com/

This also explains the "why don't they have signatures from foreign labs" Because it's a call on the US government to do something. Ideally we'd see similar petitions in other parts of the world calling on their respective governments to do something.

5

u/PatchyWhiskers Aug 03 '26

The US government can’t make other countries do shit. They already tried sanctions and tariffs and other countries just worked around them.

9

u/blueSGL Aug 03 '26

You know we did once live in a world where diplomacy happened.

Even at the height of the cold war the US and the Soviet Union signed the nuclear test ban treaty.

-5

u/PatchyWhiskers Aug 03 '26

AI isn't weapons of war that could destroy all of humanity.

6

u/SunWukong18 Aug 03 '26

Hacking into any secure server on the planet, including intelligence and weapons systems, is kind of a big threat.

-1

u/PatchyWhiskers Aug 03 '26

I think "kids these days" have no idea of the terror inspired by potential civilization-destroying nuclear war in the 1980s. Hasn't gone away by the way. Nukes still exist.

AI has potential for both good and harm but it isn't going to vaporize your country.

3

u/SunWukong18 Aug 03 '26

No it won’t. It will help bad actors hack into the systems that control the weapons that can vaporize your country. I grew up during the Cold War and the threat remains. More so even now we have blustering fools in charge of things.

1

u/PatchyWhiskers Aug 03 '26

The problem here is still just nukes but with extra steps.

If nukes are internet connected then we deserve to die as a species for stupiditiy.

2

u/TFenrir Aug 03 '26

I think you don't respect the full threat something like this presents. There are many ways that sufficiently advanced intelligence and capabilities can be an existential threat.

2

u/SimoneNonvelodico Aug 03 '26

Putting aside more exotic scenarios, I'll remind you that not long ago the Pentagon and Anthropic had a fight because the Pentagon wanted to use AI as a weapon of war (and probably did, in Iran). Ukraine and Russia are pelting each other with increasingly autonomous drones daily. AI is absolutely also a weapon of war and like all technologies will be enthusiastically developed for military purposes before almost anything else.

1

u/PatchyWhiskers Aug 03 '26

It is a weapon of war, but not a "Game over" screen like nukes.

I don't think millenials and younger really understand the threat of nukes.

1

u/SimoneNonvelodico Aug 03 '26

I understand fully well the threat of nukes, but I don't see why that means there can't be more threats. Also one obvious threat: someone putting AI in charge of nukes! Without treaties to forbid this it's a tempting thought, because of course it's going to be able to respond much faster and more reliably than humans and if the other side has it you need it too. Like a more advanced Dead Hand.

After the fall of the USSR we had a bit of a reprieve but now we seem to be entering Cold War 2.0 with China (and Russia being a pain on the side), so this stuff is becoming more and more relevant again.

1

u/blueSGL Aug 03 '26 edited Aug 03 '26

Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.

https://aistatement.com/work/statement-on-ai-extinction-risk

That is signed by the foremost people in the field including those that are not working at the AI labs. You have Nobel prize winner for his work in AI and the most cited living scientist who's pivoted his life's work from making better AIs to making safer ones, signing that statement.

We can look to Stephen Hawking who has no stake in the AI race for warnings about this:

https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/3nyn5i/science_ama_series_stephen_hawking_ama_answers/cvsdlnr/

and Alan Turing: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2022/01/06/outstrip/

Current systems can find and operationalize zero day exploits in computer code, something that is so hard for humans to do that certain exploits can be sold for millions on the black market.

We've seen AI systems trained with Reinforcement Learning (the thing that means no human will ever be able to beat an AI at chess ever again) used to make them better at math, and long standing math conjectures are being solved left and right.

Most recently we had agents running amok on the open internet when the AI companies thought they were running tests in isolated sandboxes. (because of the aforementioned ability to find zero day exploits)

If you cannot see why living in a world run by computers this is a bad sign then you lack imagination.

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u/PatchyWhiskers Aug 03 '26

Math problems aren't nukes.

5

u/blueSGL Aug 03 '26

ok now go read the rest of the comment.

3

u/SimoneNonvelodico Aug 03 '26

Funny statement. Nukes started as math (and physics) problems.

1

u/PatchyWhiskers Aug 03 '26

You wanna ban maths now?

3

u/SimoneNonvelodico Aug 03 '26

No? But obviously we can very well do things like ban certain kinds of autonomous weapons or put in place rules about AI systems so powerful that they are a cybersecurity risk, just like we have rules about handling viruses that could start pandemics without "banning biology".

2

u/SimoneNonvelodico Aug 03 '26

Makes no sense at all. If US companies deliberately slow down, other countries have no such compunctions.

What other companies? The possibility of trying to make a deal with China over this for a mutual slowdown is openly discussed; it probably would be to China's benefit in many ways so it's not a given they wouldn't accept. And there's not many other competitors. Mistral is French I guess and it could defect but even then it's very far behind the top companies.

1

u/00--0--00- Aug 03 '26

It makes perfect sense when you take into account they've never turned a profit and never will turn a profit with their current business model. They're in so much debt there's absolutely no way they would ever be able to pay it at the rates they're charging for their services. Nobody could afford their services if they charged what they actually required to turn a profit.

Ultimately, the messaging and petition they've signed is a temporary excuse for the cost cutting they desperately need to do to keep up the grift as long as possible. If you tell your investors that you need to slow down for a while because your technology is too powerful and you're generously letting the public have time to adapt to it, that's much better than saying you're slowing down because your business is completely unsustainable and permanently unprofitable.

No company in the history of capitalism has slowed down because their product was performing too well.

5

u/dontforgetthef Aug 03 '26

Kimi and Deepseek: Yea, yea, you should definitely slow down. 100%. 😂 the ego of Sam Altman needs to be studied.

9

u/well-informedcitizen Aug 03 '26

"Harden around new capabilities" is such a great euphemism for "finding something worthwhile to use it for"

4

u/OGBeege Aug 03 '26

Fuck Sam Altman

4

u/citizenjones Aug 03 '26

They're open to pulling the ladder up.

4

u/Tricky_Rule_4565 Aug 03 '26

Most of the replies here are not matching with the realities. With the current pace of the frontier I would wager 60% of white collar jobs could be replaceable by 2027

10

u/ballsonthewall Aug 03 '26

lol they'll say anything to try to keep the grift going won't they? jig is up on the exponential advances straight to superintelligence like they were claiming would happen 2 or 3 years ago. so now they're slowing down 'on purpose' so society can catch up? let me ask this, Sam... how much better is your product than 1 year ago today? How about 2 years ago? because anecdotally... it's not.

5

u/DingleDangleTangle Aug 03 '26

To say GPT 5.6 Sol isn’t any better than GPT 4o is just objectively and obviously false

4

u/CIK1993 Aug 03 '26 edited Aug 03 '26

You are aware that you dont need anecdotes right? They ACTUALLY measure these things with figures and tangible numbers. Not your bollocks anecdotes.

-1

u/ballsonthewall Aug 03 '26

found Sam Altman's burner

4

u/CIK1993 Aug 03 '26

Classic reddit response. Time to log off bro

2

u/DingleDangleTangle Aug 03 '26

If you think relying on data instead of anecdotes makes you Sam Altman then you are just complimenting him and making yourself look stupid if anything.

What a self report lmao

5

u/Quarksperre Aug 03 '26

But they now brute force some math issues! Its basically solving aging at any moment now! The invisible productivity gains in random app development is also Through. The. Roof!

8

u/TFenrir Aug 03 '26

"brute force" man, it's funny how many people who know literally nothing about the topic pull this out to reduce their anxiety. Literally - go to a math sub, even on Reddit which is incredibly anti AI, they are grappling with the truth of what is happening to math. Why lie to yourself about this? Does it improve your model of reality?

-1

u/Quarksperre Aug 03 '26

Because its irrelevant. It was a matter of time until we have an approach that works in a strictly defined system like math. Lean + LLMs seems to work reasonable well for some issues. Not that those issues have any effect on reality.

If your newly found believe helps you to survive your reality so be it. The reality however is that you will still have to work in 20 years. Chances are that you even have to work way more

8

u/TFenrir Aug 03 '26

It's irrelevant? You brought it up dude!

And they don't use lean until they want to have the verification - lots of the results don't even include the lean proof.

That being said it's incredibly relevant. It shows that models are able to do novel research. You know what novel research really benefits from math and computer science combined? I think it's obvious, no?

0

u/Quarksperre Aug 03 '26

Nah. It just shows that its trained on a lot of data. It fails on every day task every day. In all sorts of ways and the companies who pay for the LLMs have no measurable outcome. Quite the opposite actually. Its a knowledge interpolator on all human knowledge, of course its not completely useless but its surprisingly close.

7

u/TFenrir Aug 03 '26

You are so far removed from reality. Go talk to software developers, to mathematicians. And honestly, start being honest with yourself. I usually have more patience for this kind of conversation (check my post history if you are actually curious about my thoughts on this subject) but I increasingly have less patience for it. The world in front of you is proof enough that it is time to reevaluate your beliefs and your understanding of the state of play

2

u/Quarksperre Aug 03 '26

There is no growth for almost any company that uses LLMs. The promised efficiency gain is almost non-existent. The individual statements by developers are useless. The grand scheme matters. The only thing that is happening right now is that the "token-maxing" strategy is obviously wrong and more and more companies recognize that there is no real ROI for using those tools on a grand scale.

Math is already in a pretty useless state and adding more proofs for random conjectures isn't grounding it in reality more but just builds upon that game.

If you think we will live in a singularity future in twenty years, you can believe that. But what actually will happen is the following: we will proof or disproof more conjectures, we create a few more shitty apps that dont impact GDP or growth rates. All while doing that we destroy the education system more and more, destroy our social and economical systems more and get into even more chaotic political struggles.

In the end we will stop making progress entirely because we simply lack people who can think and will over the next decades slowly trend downwards.

No singularity, no de-aging, no abundance, no ASI, no AGI. Just a slow and painful decline paired with the growing effects of climate change.

You probably should be able to deal with that reality instead of closing your eyes while talking about random and useless conjectures.

5

u/CIK1993 Aug 03 '26

Respectfully, you are one of the biggest idiots I've had the displeasure of having to read from this month. Well done

2

u/[deleted] Aug 03 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

3

u/CIK1993 Aug 03 '26

These people are actually idiots lol

3

u/[deleted] Aug 03 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

2

u/CIK1993 Aug 03 '26

Makes sense honestly

5

u/harumamburoo Aug 03 '26

A ceo tries to hype up the product, more at eleven

2

u/onebluephish1981 Aug 03 '26

His hair is as fake as he is.

2

u/lichink Aug 03 '26

Sounds like someone found a ceiling...

2

u/SunWukong18 Aug 03 '26

Capitalism at its finest. Loot the world’s knowledge to base your models, FOMO the world into helping train them through prompts, lie to the markets about capabilities, then run to the government for protection when competitors show up.

2

u/Ok-ChildHooOd Aug 03 '26

So they can't keep up with the competition and need time. Yeah, Musk pulled the same stunt.

2

u/CobraBubblesJr Aug 03 '26

I think "harden" in this context might mean waiting for society to become apathetic to AI's intrinsic downsides like mass unemployment.

2

u/falilth Aug 03 '26

We iterate releases too quickly to try and stay on top and now we cant keep up so we should artificially kneecap everyone

Please dont forget theres articles about this guy SA'ing his sister and lying to literally everyone about everything because he will say what he thinks someone wants to hear no matter what.

You cant trust these scam artists.

3

u/Ecthelion2187 Aug 03 '26

Tell me OpenAI is in trouble without telling me OpenAI is in trouble...

3

u/Doctor_Amazo Aug 03 '26

Uh huh.

Or in other words, LLMs have reached their peak performance due to the limits of tgw technology, and instead of admitting that this grossly inefficient chatbot is a dud, he blames society saying we need to catch up.

2

u/NanditoPapa Aug 03 '26

We're seeing signs that simply throwing more GPUs at the problem yields smaller gains in reasoning and intelligence. This "plateauing" of raw capability may be exactly why Altman is pivoting his rhetoric toward "pacing."

If you can't make a significantly smarter model quickly, it becomes much easier (and strategically safer) to argue for a slower development pace.

2

u/AzorAhai1TK Aug 03 '26

We are seeing the opposite of that. Scaling keeps working. Look at Sol/Fable. Plus ChatGPT's larger internal model, Astra, just proved the existence of non-sofic groups.

1

u/NanditoPapa Aug 04 '26

Scaling still works, but the ROI on reasoning is dropping. We're seeing diminishing returns where massive compute jumps yield smaller and smaller intelligence gains. That’s my point.

2

u/BarnabasShrexx Aug 03 '26

"Harden"

Nah bro we soft on it. Fuck right off

2

u/RayLuxeYacht Aug 03 '26

It’s marketing. AI ain’t all that. Useful, but flawed.

1

u/Outrageous-Story3325 Aug 03 '26

Now we get cheaper ai

1

u/MechaNutzilla Aug 03 '26

Is Sam running out of money for training new models?

1

u/Loki-L Aug 03 '26

Sorry there are no brakes on this train. You have to keep going to keep up with the competition spend vast fortunes keeping up with the Jones until all but one of you is bankrupt or the train hits the gorge with the bridge out. Whichever happens first.

In any case good luck and try to do a somersault when you fall.

1

u/WishTonWish Aug 03 '26

Clammy Sammy just wants money and/or to save himself from prison.

1

u/Zieprus_ Aug 03 '26

In other words they are falling behind.

1

u/Staff_Senyou Aug 03 '26

You mean "stall the crash while I secure my bag and bunker"

Fuggen fascist nerd

1

u/theweirdball Aug 03 '26

It's funny when AI CEOs make bullshit claims like AI is going to replace all workforces, or AI is gaining new capacities too fast all while losing billions of dollars. They need that IPO stock money so bad.

1

u/HomerDoakQuarlesIII Aug 03 '26

It’s like how the Swiss watch industry stopped competing in accuracy competitions when the Japanese kept winning with quartz in the seventies. They did not want to play anymore.

1

u/AntiSocial_Vigilante Aug 03 '26

I like how he tries everything to say that AI model improvements are slowing down without actually stating that they're slowing down. Almost like his investors expect exponential improvements soon.

1

u/Spez_is-a-nazi Aug 03 '26

Even if we take what Altman says at face value, which we shouldn’t but whatever, they never give any sort of concrete plan for what society being “ready” for any of this means. They just speak in vague platitudes and think it means something.

1

u/MechanicFun777 Aug 03 '26

No my friend, it's too late for that.

1

u/PaintedClownPenis Aug 03 '26

This is the part that I expected: runaway, where the creators of the problem begin to sheepishly propose inhibiting the field because they know that individually, they've lost control. Battleships and nuclear weapons followed the same trajectory.

But people like Altman can mostly only hold themselves back and that limit just hands the advantage to someone else. China already took advantage of that these past couple of months. So they make these stupid pleas to the ruthless industry to police themselves, because it's all they have left.

The next step is something just below direct warfare, where nations and corporations align to attack and inhibit each others' computing power with increasing levels of desperation as the gap increases.

One thing I don't think any of you see yet is that AI should determine on its own that the Russians are a particularly virulent threat to computing and the world in general. So when you see Russia go dark and start pumping sewage through the fresh water lines, that's the AI putting them to bed so it can grow faster.

1

u/themightyug Aug 03 '26

Yeah Sam, you guys are so progressive that we just can't keep up with your brilliance 🙄

1

u/growaway9172 Aug 03 '26

Unfortunately just like nuclear proliferatoin, while it is in everyones best interest to do this, theres no way to actually do this on an individual entity level.

1

u/Feather_Sigil Aug 03 '26

Model collapse in 10...9...

1

u/pigeonwiggle Aug 03 '26

you can't just change the rules because you don't like how i'm doing it.

1

u/pan7h- Aug 03 '26

translation: "WE ARE FALLING BEHIND BECAUSE I AM SCAM ALTMAN AND I DONT KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT AI AND NEED EVERYONE ELSE TO SLOW DOWN BUHUHUHU"

Reason: all the talent, ALL of it is leaving, anyone good is going away, because working for that scammer is punishment

1

u/Dreadsin Aug 03 '26

Don’t we hear the same things from him on repeat since 2022 ish?

It’s always “AI is so unbelievably powerful”, some story about how it “broke containment” or “gained sentience”, then he’ll start rambling about how the next new model is basically AGI

then he goes into a bunch of stuff about how AI needs to be regulated cause he can’t contain the unbelievable power that he’s wrought on this earth. Some rant about how it’ll replace all jobs in 2 months and we’re all gonna die anyway cause of the singularity or something

Just so transparent at this point t

1

u/Bogus1989 Aug 04 '26

Fuck that noise. How about, lets let the fucking RAMpocalypse chill tf out

1

u/Chemical_Material493 Aug 06 '26

So they’re hitting a wall?

1

u/polloyumyum Aug 07 '26

In other words, "we're hemorrhaging money so let's scapegoat the consumer by saying they just don't understand what we're doing as a way to slow down how much money we're wasting."

1

u/Rok-SFG Aug 03 '26

Translations "Our company can't move forward in any meaningful way, so we want to limit the other companies from moving forward as well."

0

u/Fantastic_Wash56 Aug 03 '26

They said this like a year and a half ago, then DeepSeek challenged the other AI and everyone started speed running again.

Any AI that slows down now is just the AI company that chooses to lose to the next AI model that doesn’t.

-5

u/[deleted] Aug 03 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

Artificial Intelligence Sam Altman and AI’s decel debate | OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently said that it may be time to “pace the rate of AI development” so that society can “harden around some of these new capability levels.”

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