The Pacing of the Frontier

In the wake of the letter calling on us to prepare to potentially Pace the Frontier , there has been much discussion of when pacing the frontier would be prudent, and whether it makes sense to prepare to do so. This has now been informed by the events surrounding OpenAI training models for months while they had access to a joint de facto message board , which was detected only in the wake of the hacking of HuggingFace by OpenAI’s AIs models during a cybersecurity eval. As we find out more about that, a lot of people have grown far more alarmed, as they should given what they previously believed about the difficulty of alignment, about the state of capabilities and about the level of operational supervision, infrastructure, safety and safety culture at the frontier labs. This post will not go further into the details of that incident. It treats that as background to keep in mind, and mostly involves perspectives from before the Black Hat talk. This was originally scheduled for Friday and got bumped. A lot of the disagreements about the need to pace tie into expectations about the default pace of capability advancements. As I wrote recently in The Three AI Pills , sincere disagreements about AI policy usually boil down to disagreements about the expected pace of progress, and what we expect future AIs will be able to do. Table of Contents Danger, Will Robinson. Progress Fast and Slow. Statements of Support For Pacing the Frontier. No One In Charge. Pacing The Frontier. Pausing…