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Why would the current winners of the race want this? This would be catastrophic for their companies as others caught up. Ironically its the current losers that would cynically want this as it would allow them to catch up. I'm so tired of these takes that hallucinate some cynical interest that falls apart in two seconds of thought because it's impossible to imagine that the type of people who have been publicly posting about and discussing the dangerous ai since before the industry existed could possibly care about the singular thing they've been warning about for over a decade.
Who? Who the fuck are these other better mouse trap makers that they're afraid of? it doesn't make any sense. If signaling that they're willing to give up their lead isn't enough to show you that they are serious about the problem then what possible action could change your mind?
China I would think? OFC they are more like "similar but slightly worse mousetrap, but without the 'we need a trillion dollars'" thing, but still...
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Because any regulatory regime is likely to impose costs that they can bear but competitors may not be able to. Whatever the "verifiable, effective mechanism for coordinated pacing" is it will not be free to implement. If they are serious about their commitments, they can always go slower voluntarily. Nobody has a gun to their head telling them to improve as fast as possible.
There doesn't have to be someone today. There may be someone(s) in the future. OpenAI was far ahead in the AI space, until they weren't. I know of no reason why some other company couldn't come along and supplant both of them.
I don't really see how this is signalling giving up their lead. Giving it up to who?
Like what? Need a remind you that the table stakes for being a frontier lab are billions of dollars worth of compute?
The game theory here is obvious. Unilateral disarmament is not a serious proposal.
Google? Meta? Chinese labs? All pauses I've seen proposed are against the training of models past the frontier, not preventing trailing labs from catching up to the frontier.
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Perhaps because they anticipate or hope that the applicable regulations would impose a lot of bureaucratic hurdles and red tape on new players in the industry.
There are already multi-billion dollar hurdles for new players in the industry to put together enough compute to train a frontier model, the idea that having a legal department is going to be the difference is absurd. This isn't a haircutting industry.
Big companies start off as small companies. Anti-competitive regulation rarely targets the hard-to-kill large companies and instead strangles the small companies to ensure there's nobody around to grow into a big company.
Frontier models also aren't their only competition. Anthropic and OpenAI have both shown a desire to raise prices which is going to make budget and self hosted models more appealing alternatives as they do. Adding large costs to everyone in the industry doesn't just put a big barrier to entry up but also brings budget options closer on price to the big players.
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