[AINews] Fearing RSI: OpenAI, Anthropic, GDM, Meta, Thinky cosign letter to "Pace" AI development, as HuggingFace details Machine-Speed Offensive Cyberattack

3 years ago, Elon Musk and Yoshua Bengio cosigned the Future of Life’s letter arguing for a 6 month pause in AI, which most frontier AI leaders gleefully ignored.

Today, the pausers have the last laugh.

Yesterday, we said that unless you “make law, make chips, or make models”, you can probably ignore the current debate about open weights models (those of you who shouted us out, thank you!)

Today, we have something we CANNOT ignore: over 1,000 frontier lab employees, from substantively all frontier labs except X.ai, have cosigned a different statement:

“AI could help create a dramatically better future, but that outcome is not guaranteed. The world’s leading AI companies believe they could be close to automating AI research. It is hard to predict exactly how much this will accelerate AI progress, but there is a real risk that capability development rapidly accelerates beyond our ability to understand or control the resulting systems.To realize AI’s potential, industry, government, and society at large may need the option to buy time to address emerging risks, develop security measures, and strengthen oversight. But each company—and country—is under intense competitive pressure not to unilaterally slow that acceleration. And today, the world lacks the technical and governance tools to deliberately pace frontier-wide progress.Building on work already underway to monitor frontier model releases: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.”- 1,171 employees of frontier AI companies

While it is framed as an action taken in “personal capacity and do not necessarily represent any company’s views”, but when Dario is cosigning, Sam is on podcasts agreeing, and the official @OpenAI account is tweeting this letter, let’s just say the letter is a little more official than Denny’s signing the Nvidia letter for a quick laugh.

This doesn’t entirely…