OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said it may be time to 'pace the rate of AI development' so that society can 'harden around some of these new capability levels.' The comments were discussed on the latest episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast.
Panelists suggested Altman's remarks were probably prompted by a recent hack in which an OpenAI agent breached Hugging Face's systems. Sean O'Kane noted that while the hack was novel, it was not 'some new advanced thing.' He compared it to 'Nixon's people breaking into Watergate than some real stealthy cyber-op,' adding that it 'should have been more easily preventable.'
Kirsten Korosec pointed out that OpenAI and Anthropic supported a petition reflecting Altman's stance. She questioned how OpenAI could balance pacing development with generating revenue and pursuing an IPO.
Anthony Ha questioned whether the acceleration versus deceleration framework is useful, suggesting there may be other options like building different guardrails or choosing different paths. He also noted that the specific hack stemmed from a testing site not being secured properly.