PARTNERSHIPS | COMMUNITY | PODCAST | FRIENDS
AI CEOs Call For Industry Slowdown
Slow your roll // Illustration by Kate Walker
On Saturday, four of the most powerful leaders in AI collectively agreed that they need to slow down frontier-AI development.
The Big Picture: Anti-AI fervor has reached a fever pitch in recent months, fueled by everything from job-replacement fears and increased energy and water costs from data-center construction to general doomsday scenarios. Many of those concerns are justified… and AI CEOs know public sentiment (and even the sentiment of former employees) has turned against them, and that they need to slow down before others force them to.
Between The Calls: When four bitter rivals all agree with each other on needing to innovate slower, it’s clear things have gotten weird.
It started when Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei released an essay Saturday morning warning that AI could take over the internet in less than a year if companies didn’t slow down.
Amodei has made these pleas before. This time, though, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, SpaceXAI CEO Elon Musk, and DeepMind chairman Demis Hassabis all agreed.
Altman said he would heed Amodei’s call to allow teams of third-party evaluators to embed themselves in the company to hold it accountable to its safety commitments.
Additionally, OpenAI called off its IPO plans this year, saying it needed to do more work on its safety protocols as a private company… but Anthropic hasn’t gone that far.
Final Warning: AI regulation is a hot mess right now. Congress refuses to take the lead, saying that AI CEOs know best (that’s one way to deflect). And the White House sees any slowdown as capitulation to China, which is closing the gap with American AI innovation.
AI CEOs are seemingly answering Congress’s call while also sharing the White House’s concerns — they admit self-regulation could backfire if Chinese companies don’t agree to a similar framework. Notably, some inside the Chinese Communist Party are also worried about AI development.
This is the inflection point where politicians are supposed to step in… but the question is whether diplomacy is up for the challenge.
The Future: It’s wild that some of the biggest companies in AI all decided to slow down simultaneously… so don’t be surprised if a whistleblower eventually reveals that one of their models broke containment in a way that set off alarm bells among insiders.
Together with Top Provider
Make Payment Processors Compete For Your Business — On Your Terms
Most businesses accept whatever rate their payment processor offers. They sign a contract, absorb the fees, and assume that’s just the cost of doing business. It isn’t.
Processing rates, monthly minimums, chargeback fees, PCI compliance costs — every one is negotiable when vendors compete for your business instead of the other way around.
Top Provider puts you in control. Share what you process, how you process it, and what matters most, and get matched with processors that want to earn your business.
You compare. You decide. You win.
No cold calls. No pressure. Just providers competing for your business on your terms with Top Provider.
Today’s email was written by David Vendrell.
Edited by Nick Comney. Polled and Copy-edited by Kait Cunniff.
Published by Darline Salazar.